Indeed, 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.