For example, Of all the passions, however, which are so extravagantly disproportioned to the value of their objects, love is the only one that appears, even to the weakest minds, to have any thing in it that is either graceful or agreeable. The natural replaces the divine. A traditional discourse, such as, for example, that of the prophet Mohammed, would identify that which is good and ought to be with God s will. Smith helps found modernity by employing natural as a buzz word that identifies what ought to be. Conversely, artificial becomes a key pejorative label.
Prudence replaces wisdom as the first virtue.
It was also the first of the seven cardinal virtues of Christendom. It meant the government of life by reason, where the very idea of reason, as reason was in those times conceived, carried overtones of divinity and solidarity. Smith utilizes ideas from Roman stoic philosophy to name the first virtue as prudence instead. Prudence, as Smith and the stoics he cites use the term, carries forward the idea of governing life by reason, but it modifies it in such a way that the first virtue comes to mean, first and foremost, taking care of one s self. A myth about the history of law shapes civil religion.