Throughout the eighteenth century the prudential considerations against which Shaftesbury and a few others protested weighed like an incubus both upon religion and on morals.  ’Oh Happiness! our being’s end and aim,’[285] was the seldom failing refrain, echoed in sermons and essays, in theological treatises and ethical studies.  And though the idea of happiness varies in endless degrees from the highest to the meanest, yet even the highest conception of it cannot be substituted for that of goodness without great detriment to the religion or philosophy which has thus unduly exalted it.  When Tillotson, or Berkeley,[286] or Bishop Butler, or William Law, as well as Chubb[287] and Tindal,[288] spoke of happiness as the highest end, they meant something very different from ’the sleek and sordid epicurism, in which religion and a good conscience have their place among the means by which life is to be made more comfortable.’[289] William Law’s definition of happiness as ’the satisfaction of all means, capacities, and necessities, the order and harmony of his being; in other words, the right state of a man,’[290] has not much in common with the motives of expedience urged by Bentham and Paley, utilitarian systems, truly spoken of as ’of the earth, earthy.’[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]