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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: forming habits and strengthening impulses and principles by use. One acts more easily and forcibly as he has acted, until set forms and modes of action become fixed and permanent. This is true not of outward acts merely, but equally of inward acts, of thoughts, feelings, and choices. The entire impulse, force, and tendency of the whole nature may at length be brought to act in one direction, and so confirmed in it that no change can be easily effected. Then all subsequent action regularly takes that form and color. But as we seek to learn in the study of Ethics the true end of each part of our nature and of the whole, their mutual relations to each other, the proper ends, rules, and motives of life, we are enabled to shape and guide ourselves and others aright, to avoid error and loss, and to form that character which best fulfils the end of our being. (4) The fact that we have a divine revelation does not do away with the necessity of studying Ethics. On the contrary, it increases this necessity, because the knowledge which it brings of moral and religious things widens the sphere of duty and deepens its import. The Bible teaches the great duty of life, and perhaps all the duties, in some way or other, either directly or by implication; but it does not give us any system of practical or theoretical Ethics. " It rather portrays ideal types of moral excellence and lays down broad principles for our guidance, than assigns rules immediately applicable to the varied exigencies of practical life." It makes men reflective and morally thoughtful by its exhibition of the greatness of human nature in itself and in its relations, of God's present government over men, of his law and its awful sanctions, of his love and the exalted privilege of sharing it and living in the light of it. The...