, to admit, on account of their greater
keenness as pleasures. It would be at best but well-meaning cant to
pretend that the self-approval, the sympathetic participation in other
people's augmented welfare, the grateful consciousness of having done
that which is pleasing in our Heavenly Father's sight, together with
whatever else helps to compose the internal reward of virtue, constitute
a sum total of delight nearly as exquisite as that which may be obtained
in a variety of other ways. The mere circumstance of there being
invariably included in a just or generous action more or less of
self-denial, self-restraint, or self-sacrifice, must always sober down
the gratification by which virtue is rewarded, and make it appear tame
beside the delirium of gladness caused by many things with which virtue
has nothing to do. We will charitably suppose that the occupant of a
dukedom, who should secretly light upon conclusive proof that it was not
his by right, would at once abandon it to the legal heir, and we need
not doubt that he would subsequently be, on the whole, well content to
have so acted, but we cannot suppose that he would make the surrender
with anything like the elation with which he entered on the estate and
title. If there were really no pleasure equal to that with which virtue
recompenses its votaries, the performance of a virtuous act would always
make a man happier than previously; moreover, the greater the virtue,
the greater would be the consequent pleasure. But any one may see that
an act of the most exalted virtue, far from increasing, often utterly
destroys the agent's happiness. Imagine an affectionate father, some
second Brutus or second Fitzstephen of Galway, constrained by
overwhelming sense of duty to sentence a beloved son to death, or a
bankrupt beggaring himself and his family by honestly making over to his
creditors property with which he might have safely absconded. Plainly,
such virtuous achievement, far from adding to the happiness of its
author, has plunged him in an abyss of misery, his only comfort being
that in the lowest deep there is, as we shall presently see, a lower
deep still. Far from being happier than he was before acting as he has
done, he would be much happier if, being vicious instead of virtuous, he
had not felt bound so to act. Unquestionably, what either upright judge
or honest bankrupt has incurred--the one by becoming a saticide, the
other by making himself a beggar--is pure a