but meritorious.  It is incumbent on every one to restrain the pursuit of his personal objects within the limits consistent with the essential interests of others.  What those limits are, it is the province of ethical science to determine; and to keep all individuals and aggregations of individuals within them, is the proper office of punishment and of moral blame.  If in addition to fulfilling this obligation, persons make the good of others a direct object of disinterested exertions, postponing or sacrificing to it even innocent personal indulgences, they deserve gratitude and honour, and are fit objects of moral praise.  So long as they are in no way compelled to this conduct by any external pressure, there cannot be too much of it; but a necessary condition is its spontaneity; since the notion of a happiness for all, procured by the self-sacrifice of each, if the abnegation is really felt to be a sacrifice, is a contradiction.  Such spontaneity by no means excludes sympathetic encouragement; but the encouragement should take the form of making self-devotion pleasant, not that of making everything else painful.  The object should be to stimulate services to humanity by their natural rewards; not to render the pursuit of our own good in any other manner impossible, by visiting it with the reproaches of other and of our own conscience.  The proper office of those sanctions is to enforce upon every one, the conduct necessary to give all other persons their fair chance:  conduct which chiefly consists in not doing them harm, and not impeding them in anything which without harming others does good to themselves.  To this must of course be added, that when we either expressly or tacitly undertake to do more, we are bound to keep our promise.  And inasmuch as every one, who avails himself of the advantages of society, leads others to expect from him all such positive good offices and disinterested services as the moral improvement attained by mankind has rendered customary, he deserves moral blame if, without just cause, he disappoints that expectation.  Through this principle the domain of moral duty is always widening.  When what once was uncommon virtue becomes common virtue, it comes to be numbered among obligations, while a degree exceeding what has grown common, remains simply meritorious.

M. Comte is accustomed to draw most of his ideas of moral cultivation from the discipline of the Catholic Church.  Had he followed that guidance in the present case, he would have been less wide of the mark.  For the distinction which we have drawn was fully recognized by the sagacious and far-sighted men who created the Catholic ethics.  It is even one of the stock reproaches against Catholicism, that it has two standards of morality, and does not make obligatory on all Christians the highest rule of Christian perfection.  It has one standard which, faithfully acted up to, suffices for salvation, another and a higher which when realized constitutes a saint.  M. Comte, perhaps unconsciously, for there is nothing that he would have been more unlikely to do if he had been aware of it, has taken a leaf out of the book of the despised Protestantism.  Like the extreme Calvinists, he requires that all believers shall be saints, and damns then (after his own fashion) if they are not.