nd simple pain, unmitigated
by one particle of positive pleasure. Yet it is at the same time certain
that the virtue of each has in some form or other given full
compensation for the pain it has occasioned, for not only was that pain
deliberately incurred in lieu of the pleasure which it has supplanted,
but restoration of the pleasure would now be refused, if reversal of the
virtuous conduct were made a condition of the restoration. In what,
then, does the compensation consist? In nothing else than this, in judge
or bankrupt having been saved from pain still greater than that which he
is actually suffering. Wretched as he is, infinitely more wretched than
he was before there was any call upon him to act as he has done, he is
less wretched than he would be if, recognising the obligation so to act,
he had not so acted. He has escaped the stings of conscience, the sense
of having wronged his neighbour and offended his God; he has escaped, in
short, self-condemnation--a torment so intolerable to those so
constituted as to be susceptible of it, that hell itself has been known
to be, in imagination at least, preferred to it. Mr. Mill's splendid
outburst that, rather than worship a fiend that could send him to hell
for refusing, he would go to hell as he was bid, will doubtless occur to
every reader.

This, however, is all. In both the supposed cases, as in every one in
which virtue consists of compliance with a painful duty, the pleasure
arising from the practice of virtue cannot in strictness be called
pleasure at all. At best it is but a partial negation of pain; more
properly, indeed, the substitution of one pain for another more acute.
Yet this mere negation, this ethereal inanity, is pronounced by
Utilitarianism to be preferable to aught that can come into competition
with it. Truly it is somewhat hard upon those who attend to such
teaching, to be reproached with their grossness of taste and likened to
hogs, for no better reason than their predilection for the lightest of
all conceivable diets. Still harder will this seem, when we recollect
that Utilitarians are exhorted to be virtuous, less for their own than
for other people's sakes. If, indeed, virtue were practised by all
mankind, the utilitarian idea of the greatest possible happiness, or, at
least, of the greatest possible exemption from unhappiness, would be
universally realised. Still, it is in order that they may afford
pleasure to the community at large, rather