The high consistency of character, which results from this regulated condition of the moral feelings, tends thus to promote a due attention to the various responsibilities connected with the situation in which the individual is placed. It does so, by leading him, with anxious consideration, to feel his way through these requirements, and to recognise the supreme authority of conscience over his whole moral system. It does so, especially, by habitually raising his views to the eternal One, who is the witness of all his conduct, and to whom he is responsible for his actions in each relation of life. It thus tends to preserve him from all those partial and inconsistent courses, into which men are led by the mere desire of approbation, or love of distinction, or by any other of those inferior motives which are really resolvable into self-love.
Such uniformity of moral feeling is equally opposed to another distortion of character, not less at variance with a sound condition of the mind. This is what may be called religious pretension, showing itself by much zeal for particular opinions and certain external observances, while there is no corresponding influence upon the moral feelings and the character. The truths, which form the great object of religious belief, are of so momentous a kind, that, when they are really believed, they cannot fail to produce effects of the most decided and most extensive nature;--and, where this influence is not steadily exhibited, there is a fatal error in the moral economy,--there is either self-deception, or an intention to deceive others. From such inconsistency of character arises an evil, which has a most injurious influence upon two descriptions of persons. Those of one class are led to assign an undue importance to the profession of a peculiar creed and the mere externals of religion,--to certain observations which are considered as characteristic of a particular party, and to abstinence from certain indulgences or pursuits which that party disapprove. Those of the other class, finding, in many instances, much zeal for these peculiarities, without a state of moral feeling adapted to the truths which are professed, are apt to consider the whole as either pretence or delusion.