ecause they lead to lower kinds of
happiness. But when men choose vice instead of virtue, what is
happening? They are considering the lower or the lesser happiness better
than the greater or the higher. It is this mistake that is the essence
and cause of immorality; it is this mistake that mankind is ever
inclined to make, and it is only because of this inclination that any
moral system is of any general value.

Were we all naturally inclined to morality, the analysis of it, it is
true, might have great speculative interest; but a moral system would
not be needed as it is for a great practical purpose. The law, as we all
know, has arisen because of transgressions, and the moralist has to
meddle with human nature mainly because it is inconstant and corrupted.
It is a wild horse that has not so much to be broken, once for all, as
to be driven and reined in perpetually. And the art of the moralist is,
by opening the mind's eye to the true end of life, to make us sharply
conscious of what we lose by losing it. And the men to whom we shall
chiefly want to present this end are not men, let us remember, who
desire to see it, or who will seek for it of their own accord, but men
who are turned away from it, and on whose sight it must be thrust. It is
not the righteous but the sinners that have to be called to repentance.
And not this only: not only must the end in question be thus
presentable, but when presented it must be able to stand the inveterate
criticism of those who fear being allured by it, who are content as they
are, and have no wish to be made discontented. These men will submit it
to every test by which they may hope to prove that its attractions are
delusive. They will test it with reason, as we test a metal by an acid.
They will ask what it is based upon, and of what it is compounded. They
will submit it to an analysis as merciless as that by which their
advisers have dissolved theism.

Here then is a fact that all positive morality presupposes. It
presupposes that life by its very nature contains the possibility in it
of some one kind of happiness, which is open to all men, and which is
better than all others. It is sufficiently presentable even to those who
have not experienced it; and its excellence is not vaguely apparent
only, but can be exactly proved from obvious and acknowledged facts.
Further, this happiness must be removed from its alternatives by some
very great interval. The proudest, the serenest, th