Let us apply this illustration to love.  Professor Huxley’s ginger shall stand for the sort of love he would most approve of; and love, as a whole, will be represented by a varied dessert, of which ginger is one of the dishes.  Now what Professor Huxley has to do is to recommend this ginger, and to show that it is divided by an infinite gulf—­say from prunes or from Huntley and Palmer’s biscuits.  But how is he to do this?  To say that ginger is hot is to say nothing.  To many, that may condemn instead of recommending it:  and they will have as much to say for their own tastes if they rejoin that prunes and biscuits are sweet.  If he can prove to them that what they choose is unwholesome, and that if they eat it they will be too unwell to say their prayers, then, supposing they want to say their prayers, he will have gained his point.  But if he cannot prove that it is unwholesome, or if his friends have no prayers to say, his entire recommendation dwindles to a declaration of his own personal taste.  But in this case his whole tone will be different.  There will be nothing in it of the moral imperative.  He will be only laughed at and not listened to, if he proclaims his own taste in sweetmeats with all the thunders of Sinai.  And the choice between the various kinds of love is, on positive principles, only a choice between sweetmeats.  It is this, and nothing more, than this, avowedly; and yet the positivists would keep for it the earnest language of the Christian, for whom it is a choice, not between sweetmeats and sweetmeats, but between a confectioner’s wafer and the Host.

It may perhaps be urged by some that, according to this view of it, purity is degraded into a bitter something, which we only accept reluctantly, through fear of the consequences of its alternatives.  And it is quite true that a fear of the consequences of wrong love is inseparably connected with our sense of the value of right love.  But this is a necessity of the case; the quality of the right love is in no way lowered by it, and it will lead us to consider another important point.

It is impossible to hold that one thing is incalculably better than others, without holding also that others are incalculably worse than it.  Indeed, the surest test we can give of the praise we bestow on what we choose, is the measure of condemnation we bestow on what we reject.  If we maintain that virtuous love constitutes its own heaven, we must also maintain that vicious love constitutes its own hell.  If we cannot do the last we certainly cannot do the first.  And the positive school can do neither.  It can neither elevate one kind of love nor depress the others; and for this reason.  The results of love in both cases are, according to their teaching, bounded by our present consciousness; and our present consciousness, divorced from all future expectation, has no room in it for so vast an interval as all moral systems postulate between the right love and the wrong.  Indeed,