and exalted love would at once change its character, if, without any further change, it merely believed it were free to change it.  Its strongest element is the consciousness, not that it is of such a character only, but that this character is the right one.  The ideal bride and bridegroom, the ideal man and wife, would not value purity as they are supposed to do, did they not believe that it was not only different from impurity, but essentially and incalculably better than it.  For the positivist, just as much as the Christian, this sense of rightness in love is interfused with the affection proper, and does as it were give wings to it.  It far more than makes good for the lovers any loss of intensity that may be created by the chastening down of passion:  and figuratively at least, it may be said to make them conscious that ‘underneath them are the everlasting arms.’

Here then in love, as the positive school at present offer it to us, are all these three characteristics to which that school, as we have seen, must renounce all right.  It is characterised as conforming to some special and absolute standard, of which no positive account can be given; the conformity is inward, and so cannot be enforced; and for all that positive knowledge can show us, its importance may be a dream.

We shall realise this better if we consider a love from which these three characteristics have, as far as possible, been abstracted—­a love which professes frankly to rest upon its own attractions, and which repudiates all such epithets as worse or better.  This will at once show us not only of what various developments the passion of love is capable, but also how false it is to imagine that the highest kind need naturally be the most attractive.

I have quoted Othello, and Mrs. Craven’s heroine as types of love when religionized.  We will go to the modern Parisian school for the type of love when de-religionized—­a school which, starting from the same premisses as do the positive moralists, yet come to a practical teaching that is singularly different.  And let us remember that just as the ideal we have been considering already, is the ideal most ardently looked to by one part of the world, so is the ideal we are going to consider now, looked to with an equal ardour by another part of the world.  The writer in particular from whom I am about to quote has been one of the most popular of all modern romancers; and has been hailed by men of the most fastidious culture as a preacher to these latter generations of a bolder and more worthy gospel. ’This,’[15] says one of the best known of our living poets, of the work that I select to quote from—­

    This is the golden book of spirit and sense,
    The holy writ of beauty.

Of this ‘holy writ’ the chief theme is love.  Let us go on to see how love is there presented to us.