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.