etter than
others, without holding also that others are incalculably worse than it.
Indeed, the surest test we can give of the praise we bestow on what we
choose, is the measure of condemnation we bestow on what we reject. If
we maintain that virtuous love constitutes its own heaven, we must also
maintain that vicious love constitutes its own hell. If we cannot do the
last we certainly cannot do the first. And the positive school can do
neither. It can neither elevate one kind of love nor depress the others;
and for this reason. The results of love in both cases are, according to
their teaching, bounded by our present consciousness; and our present
consciousness, divorced from all future expectation, has no room in it
for so vast an interval as all moral systems postulate between the
right love and the wrong. Indeed, if happiness be the test of right, it
cannot, as a general truth, be said that they are practically separable
at all. It is notorious that, as far as the present life goes, a man of
even the vilest affections may effectually elude all pain from them.
Sometimes they may injure his health, it is true; but they need not even
do that; and if they do, it necessitates no moral condemnation of them,
for many heroic labours would do just the same. Injury to the health, at
any rate, is a mere accident; so is also injury to the reputation; and
conditions are easily conceivable by which both these dangers would be
obviated. The supposed evils of impurity have but a very slight
reference to these. They depend, not on any present consciousness, but
on the expectations of a future consciousness--a consciousness that will
reveal things to us hereafter which we can only augur here.

_I do not know them now, but after death
God knows I know the faces I shall see:
Each one a murdered self with last low breath,
'I am thyself; what hast thou done to me?'
'And I, and I thyself!' lo each one saith,
'And thou thyself, to all eternity.'_[21]

Such is the expectation on which the supposed evils of impurity depend.
According to positive principles, the expectation will never be
fulfilled; the evils therefore exist only in a diseased imagination.

And with the beauty of purity the case is just the same. According to
the view which the positivists have adopted, so little counting the cost
of it, a pure human affection is a union of two things. It is not a
possession only, but a promise; not a sentiment only,