Chapter V: continues the subject of the authority and influence of

General Rules, maintaining that they are justly regarded as laws of the Deity. The grand advantage of general rules is to give steadiness to human conduct, and to enable us to resist our temporary varieties of temper and disposition. They are thus a grand security for human duties. That the important rules of morality should be accounted laws of the Deity is a natural sentiment. Men have always ascribed to their deities their own sentiments and passions; the deities held by them in special reverence, they have endowed with their highest ideal of excellence, the love of virtue and beneficence, and the abhorrence of vice and injustice. The researches of philosophical inquiry confirmed mankind in the supposition that the moral faculties carry the badge of authority, that they were intended as the governing principles of our nature, acting as the vicegerents of the Deity. This inference is confirmed by the view that the happiness of men, and of other rational creatures, is the original design of the Author of nature, the only purpose reconcilable with the perfections we ascribe to him.

Chapter VI. is on the cases where the Sense of Duty should be the sole motive of conduct; and on those where it ought to join with other motives. Allowing the importance of religion among human motives, he does not concur with the view that would make religious considerations the sole laudable motives of action. The sense of duty is not the only principle of our conduct; it is the ruling or governing one. It may be a question, however, on what occasions we are to proceed strictly by the sense of duty, and on what occasions give way to some other sentiment or affection. The author answers that in the actions prompted by benevolent affections, we are to follow out our sentiments as much as our sense of duty; and the contrary with the malevolent passions. As to the selfish passions, we are to follow duty in small matters, and self-interest in great. But the rules of duty predominate most in cases where they are determined with exactness, that is, in the virtue of Justice.