if happiness be the test of right, it cannot, as a general truth, be said that they are practically separable at all.  It is notorious that, as far as the present life goes, a man of even the vilest affections may effectually elude all pain from them.  Sometimes they may injure his health, it is true; but they need not even do that; and if they do, it necessitates no moral condemnation of them, for many heroic labours would do just the same.  Injury to the health, at any rate, is a mere accident; so is also injury to the reputation; and conditions are easily conceivable by which both these dangers would be obviated.  The supposed evils of impurity have but a very slight reference to these.  They depend, not on any present consciousness, but on the expectations of a future consciousness—­a consciousness that will reveal things to us hereafter which we can only augur here.

I do not know them now, but after death God knows I know the faces I shall see:  Each one a murdered self with last low breath, ‘I am thyself; what hast thou done to me?’ ‘And I, and I thyself!’ lo each one saith, ’And thou thyself, to all eternity.’[21]

Such is the expectation on which the supposed evils of impurity depend.  According to positive principles, the expectation will never be fulfilled; the evils therefore exist only in a diseased imagination.

And with the beauty of purity the case is just the same.  According to the view which the positivists have adopted, so little counting the cost of it, a pure human affection is a union of two things.  It is not a possession only, but a promise; not a sentiment only, but a pre-sentiment; not a taste only, but a foretaste; and the chief sweetness said to be found in the former, is dependent altogether upon the latter. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God,’ is the belief which, whether true or false as a fact, is implied in the whole modern cultus of love, and the religious reverence with which it has come to be regarded.  In no other way can we explain either its eclecticism or its supreme importance.  Nor is the belief in question a thing that is implied only.  Continually it is expressed also, and this even by writers who theoretically repudiate it.  Goethe, for instance, cannot present the moral aspects of Margaret’s love-story without assuming it.  And George Eliot has been obliged to presuppose it in her characters, and to exhibit the virtues she regards as noblest, on the pedestal of a belief that she regards as most irrational.  But its completest expression is naturally to be found elsewhere.  Here, for instance, is a verse of Mr. Robert Browning’s, who, however we rank him otherwise, is perhaps unrivalled for his subtle analysis of the emotions: 

    Dear, when our one soul understands
      The great soul that makes all things new,
    When earth breaks up, and heaven expands,
      How will the change strike me and you,
    In the house not made with hands?