6. Virtue generally approved, not because innate, but because profitable.
Hence naturally flows the great variety
of opinions concerning moral rules which are to be found among men, according to the different sorts of
happiness they have a prospect of, or propose to themselves; which could not be if practical principles were
innate, and imprinted in our minds immediately by the hand of God. I grant the existence of God is so many ways
manifest, and the obedience we owe him so congruous to the light of reason, that a great part of mankind give
testimony to the law of nature: but yet I think it must be allowed that several moral rules may receive from
mankind a very general approbation, without either knowing or admitting the true ground of morality; which can
only be the will and law of a God, who sees men in the dark, has in his hand rewards and punishments and power
enough to call to account the proudest offender. For, God having, by an inseparable connexion, joined virtue and
public happiness together, and made the practice thereof necessary to the preservation of society, and visibly
beneficial to all with whom the virtuous man has to do; it is no wonder that every one should not only allow, but
recommend and magnify those rules to others, from whose observance of them he is sure to reap advantage to
himself He may, out of interest as well as conviction, cry up that for sacred, which, if once trampled on and
profaned, he himself cannot be safe nor secure. This, though it takes nothing from the moral and eternal obligation
which these rules evidently have, yet it shows that the outward acknowledgment men pay to them in their words
proves not that they are innate principles: nay, it proves not so much as that men assent to them inwardly in their
own minds, as the inviolable rules of their own practice; since we find that self-interest, and the conveniences of
this life, make many men own an outward profession and approbation of them, whose actions sufficiently prove
that they very little consider the Lawgiver that prescribed these rules; nor the hell that he has ordained for the
punishment of those that transgress them.