Were we all naturally inclined to morality, the analysis of it, it is true, might have great speculative interest; but a moral system would not be needed as it is for a great practical purpose.  The law, as we all know, has arisen because of transgressions, and the moralist has to meddle with human nature mainly because it is inconstant and corrupted.  It is a wild horse that has not so much to be broken, once for all, as to be driven and reined in perpetually.  And the art of the moralist is, by opening the mind’s eye to the true end of life, to make us sharply conscious of what we lose by losing it.  And the men to whom we shall chiefly want to present this end are not men, let us remember, who desire to see it, or who will seek for it of their own accord, but men who are turned away from it, and on whose sight it must be thrust.  It is not the righteous but the sinners that have to be called to repentance.  And not this only:  not only must the end in question be thus presentable, but when presented it must be able to stand the inveterate criticism of those who fear being allured by it, who are content as they are, and have no wish to be made discontented.  These men will submit it to every test by which they may hope to prove that its attractions are delusive.  They will test it with reason, as we test a metal by an acid.  They will ask what it is based upon, and of what it is compounded.  They will submit it to an analysis as merciless as that by which their advisers have dissolved theism.

Here then is a fact that all positive morality presupposes.  It presupposes that life by its very nature contains the possibility in it of some one kind of happiness, which is open to all men, and which is better than all others.  It is sufficiently presentable even to those who have not experienced it; and its excellence is not vaguely apparent only, but can be exactly proved from obvious and acknowledged facts.  Further, this happiness must be removed from its alternatives by some very great interval.  The proudest, the serenest, the most successful life of vice, must be miserable when compared with the most painful life of virtue, and miserable in a very high degree; for morality is momentous exactly in proportion to the interval between the things to be gained and escaped by it.  And unless this interval be a very profound one, the language at present current as to the importance of virtue, the dignity of life, and the earnestness of the moral struggle, will be altogether overstrained and ludicrous.

Now is such a happiness a reality or is it a myth?  That is the great question.  Can human life, cut off utterly from every hope beyond itself—­can human life supply it?  If it cannot, then evidently there can be no morality without religion.  But perhaps it can.  Perhaps life has greater capacities than we have hitherto given it credit for.  Perhaps this happiness may be really close at hand for each of us, and we have only overlooked it hitherto because