These men will submit it to every test by which they may hope to prove that its attractions are delusive.

They will test it with reason, as we test a metal by an acid.
They will ask what it is based upon, and of what it is compounded.

They will submit it to an analysis as merciless as that by which their advisers have dissolved theism.
Here then is a fact that all positive morality presupposes.

It presupposes that life by its very nature contains the possibility in it of some one kind of happiness, which is open to all men, and which is better than all others.

It is sufficiently presentable even to those who have not experienced it; and its excellence is not vaguely apparent only, but can be exactly proved from obvious and acknowledged facts.
Further, this happiness must be removed from its alternatives by some very great interval.