The apex

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1903. Excerpt: ... to do so, counting not their lives dear unto them in their desire for others' good. The things of which Christ meant us to deny ourselves are those which are injurious to us. He did say, "deny thyself and take up the cross, and follow me," but He meant that we should deny ourselves of crime, such as murder, theft, envy, unnecessary labor on the Sabbath, gluttony, drunkenness, or any of the physical or mental crimes in the whole catalogue of law. Mr. John Stuart Mill says:--"Utilitarianism requires a person to be as strictly impartial as between his own happiness and that of others as a disinterested and benevolent spectator. If the end which the utilitarian doctrine proposes to itself, were not in theory and practice, acknowledged to be an end, nothing could ever convince any person that it is so. No reason can be given why the general happiness is desirable, except that each person, so far as he believes it to be attainable, desires his own happiness. This, however, being a fact, we have not only all the proof which the case admits of, but all which it is possible to require, that happiness is a good to that person, and the general happiness therefore, a good to the aggregate of persons. Happiness has made out its title as one of the ends of conduct, and consequently one of the criteria of morality. But it has not, by this alone, proved itself to be the sole criterion. To do that, it would seem by the same rule necessary to show, not only that people desire happiness, but that they never desire anything else. Now it is palpable that they do desire things which, in common language, are decidedly distinguished from happiness. They desire, for example, virtue, and the absence of vice, no less really than pleasure, and the absence of pain." This seems to me ...