applicable to numberless cases which that sanction does not, and, in
fact, cannot reach; secondly, the legal sanction, even in those cases
which it reaches, is greatly reinforced by the social sanction, which
adds the pains arising from an evil reputation, and all the indefinable
social inconveniences which an evil reputation brings with it, to the
actual penalties inflicted by the law.

The religious sanction varies, of course, with the different religious
creeds, and, in the more imperfect forms of religion, by no means always
operates in favour of morality. But it will be sufficient here to
consider the religious sanction solely in relation to Christianity. As
enforced by the Bible and the Church, the religious sanctions of conduct
are two, which I shall call the higher and the lower sanctions. By the
latter I mean the hope of the divine reward or the fear of the divine
punishment, either in this world or the next; by the former, the love of
God and that veneration for His nature which irresistibly inspires the
effort to imitate His perfections. The lower religious sanction is
plainly the same in kind with the legal sanction. If a man is induced to
do or to refrain from doing a certain action from fear of punishment,
the motive is the same, whether the punishment be for a long time or a
short one, whether it is to take immediate effect or to be deferred for
a term of years. And, similarly, the same is the case with rewards. No
peculiar merit, as it appears to me, can be claimed by a man because he
acts from fear of divine punishment rather than of human punishment, or
from hope of divine rewards rather than of human rewards. The only
differences between the two sanctions are (1) that the hopes and fears
inspired by the religious sanction are, to one who believes in their
reality, far more intense than those inspired by the legal sanction, the
two being related as the temporal to the eternal, and (2) that, inasmuch
as God is regarded as omnipresent and omniscient, the religious sanction