rthy.'[291] But, in any case, even the highest conception of the
expedient rests on a lower plane of principle than the humblest
aspiration after the right. The expedient and the right are not
opposites; they are different in kind.[292] They may be, and ought to
be, blended as springs of action. No scheme of morals, and no practical
divinity can be wholly satisfactory in which virtue and holiness are not
equally mated with prudence and heavenly wisdom, each serving but not
subservient to the other. 'Art thou,' says Coleridge, 'under the tyranny
of sin--a slave to vicious habits, at enmity with God, and a skulking
fugitive from thine own conscience? Oh, how idle the dispute whether the
listening to the dictates of prudence from prudential and
self-interested motives be virtue or merit, when the not listening is
guilt, misery, madness, and despair.'[293] The self-love which Butler
has analysed with so masterly a hand is wholly compatible with the pure
love of goodness. Plato did not think it needful to deny the claims of
utilitarianism, however much he gave the precedence to the ideal
principle.[294]

But when the idea of goodness is subordinated to the pursuit of
happiness, the evil effects are soon manifest. It is not merely that
'Epicureanism popularised inevitably turns to vice.'[295] Whenever in
any form self-interest usurps that first place which the Gospel assigns
to 'the Kingdom of God and his righteousness,' the calculating element
draws action down to its own lower level. 'If you mean,' says Romola,
'to act nobly and seek the best things God has put within reach of men,
you must learn to fix your mind on that end and not on what will happen
to you because of it.'[296] It has been observed, too, with a truth none
the less striking for being almost a commonplace, that there is
something very self-destructive in the quest for happiness.[297]
Happiness and true pleasure ultimately reward the right, but if they are
made the chief object, they lose in quality and elude the grasp. 'So far
as you try to be good, in order to be personally happy, you miss
happiness--a great and beautiful law of our being.'[298]

Utilitarianism or eudaemonism has no sort of intrinsic connection with a
latitudinarian theology, especially when the word 'latitudinarian' is
used, as in this chapter, in a general and inoffensive sense. In this
century, and to some extent in the last, many of its warmest opponents
have been Broad Churchmen. But