lue purity as
they are supposed to do, did they not believe that it was not only
different from impurity, but essentially and incalculably better than
it. For the positivist, just as much as the Christian, this sense of
rightness in love is interfused with the affection proper, and does as
it were give wings to it. It far more than makes good for the lovers any
loss of intensity that may be created by the chastening down of passion:
and figuratively at least, it may be said to make them conscious that
'_underneath them are the everlasting arms_.'

Here then in love, as the positive school at present offer it to us, are
all these three characteristics to which that school, as we have seen,
must renounce all right. It is characterised as conforming to some
special and absolute standard, of which no positive account can be
given; the conformity is inward, and so cannot be enforced; and for all
that positive knowledge can show us, its importance may be a dream.

We shall realise this better if we consider a love from which these
three characteristics have, as far as possible, been abstracted--a love
which professes frankly to rest upon its own attractions, and which
repudiates all such epithets as worse or better. This will at once show
us not only of what various developments the passion of love is capable,
but also how false it is to imagine that the highest kind need naturally
be the most attractive.

I have quoted Othello, and Mrs. Craven's heroine as types of love when
religionized. We will go to the modern Parisian school for the type of
love when de-religionized--a school which, starting from the same
premisses as do the positive moralists, yet come to a practical teaching
that is singularly different. And let us remember that just as the ideal
we have been considering already, is the ideal most ardently looked to
by one part of the world, so is the ideal we are going to consider now,
looked to with an equal ardour by another part of the world. The writer
in particular from whom I am about to quote has been one of the most
popular of all modern romancers; and has been hailed by men of the most
fastidious culture as a preacher to these latter generations of a bolder
and more worthy gospel. '_This_,'[15] says one of the best known of our
living poets, of the work that I select to quote from--

_This is the golden book of spirit and sense,
The holy writ of beauty._

Of this '_holy writ_' the chief theme is