contrary to what we then supposed to be right leaves behind it a trace of dissatisfaction and pain, which may, at any future time, reappear to trouble and distress us; just as to have acted, in spite of all conflicting considerations, in a manner which we then conceived to be right, may, in after years, be a perennial source of pleasure and satisfaction.  It is characteristic of the pleasures and pains of reflexion on our past acts (which pleasures and pains of reflexion may, of course, connect themselves with other than purely moral considerations), not only that they admit of being more intense than any other pleasures and pains, but that, whenever there is any conflict between the moral sanction and any other sanction, it is to the moral sanction that they attach themselves.  Thus, if a man has incurred physical suffering, or braved the penalties of the law or the ill word of society, in pursuance of a course of conduct which he deemed to be right, he looks back upon his actions with satisfaction, and the more important the actions, and the clearer his convictions of right and the stronger the inducements to act otherwise, the more intense will his satisfaction be.  But no such satisfaction is felt, when a man has sacrificed his convictions of right to avoid physical pain, or to escape the penalties of the law, or to conciliate the goodwill of society; the feeling, on the other hand, will be that of dissatisfaction with himself, varying, according to circumstances, from regret to remorse.  And, if no similar remark has to be made with reference to the religious sanction, it is because, in all the higher forms of religion, the religious sanction is conceived of as applying to exactly the same actions as the moral sanction.  What a man himself deems right, that he conceives God to approve of, and what he conceives God as disapproving of, that he deems wrong.  But in a religion in which God was not regarded as holy, just, and true, or in which there was a plurality of gods, some good and some evil, I conceive that a man would look back with satisfaction, and not with dissatisfaction, on those acts in which he had followed his own sense of right rather than the supposed will of the Deity, just as, when there is a conflict between the two, he now congratulates himself on having submitted to the claims of conscience rather than to those of the law.

The justification, then, of that claim to superiority, which is asserted by the moral sanction, consists, I conceive, in two circumstances:  first, that the pleasures and pains, the feelings of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, of self-approbation and self-disapprobation, by means of which it works, are, in the normally constituted mind, far more intense and durable than any other pleasures and pains; secondly, that, whenever this sanction comes into conflict with any other sanction, its defeat is sure, on a careful retrospect of our acts, to bring regret or remorse, whereas its victory is equally certain to bring pleasure and satisfaction.