feeling, on the other hand, will be that of dissatisfaction with
himself, varying, according to circumstances, from regret to remorse.
And, if no similar remark has to be made with reference to the religious
sanction, it is because, in all the higher forms of religion, the
religious sanction is conceived of as applying to exactly the same
actions as the moral sanction. What a man himself deems right, that he
conceives God to approve of, and what he conceives God as disapproving
of, that he deems wrong. But in a religion in which God was not regarded
as holy, just, and true, or in which there was a plurality of gods, some
good and some evil, I conceive that a man would look back with
satisfaction, and not with dissatisfaction, on those acts in which he
had followed his own sense of right rather than the supposed will of the
Deity, just as, when there is a conflict between the two, he now
congratulates himself on having submitted to the claims of conscience
rather than to those of the law.

The justification, then, of that claim to superiority, which is asserted
by the moral sanction, consists, I conceive, in two circumstances:
first, that the pleasures and pains, the feelings of satisfaction and
dissatisfaction, of self-approbation and self-disapprobation, by means
of which it works, are, in the normally constituted mind, far more
intense and durable than any other pleasures and pains; secondly, that,
whenever this sanction comes into conflict with any other sanction, its
defeat is sure, on a careful retrospect of our acts, to bring regret or
remorse, whereas its victory is equally certain to bring pleasure and
satisfaction. We arrive, then, at the conclusion that it is the moral
sanction which is the distinctive guide of conduct, and to which we must
look, in the last resort, to enforce right action, while the other
sanctions are mainly valuable in so far as they reinforce the moral
sanction or correct its aberrations. A man must, ultimately, be the