We are told in answer to this question, that the intention of the Creator to procure the good of His creatures is evident partly from Scripture and partly from experience; and it is that intention, so manifested, which we are bound to promote. What on God’s side is teleology, on man’s is utility; utility is the ruling principle of morals. Not being a passion it cannot itself lead to action; but it regulates passion, and that, so powerfully, that all our most important laws and customs, such as the institution of property and the institution of marriage, are simply disguised forms of it.[749] As animals, we follow the dictates of nature, which would mean unhindered passion; but as reasonable beings we are under the strongest obligations to attend to the consequences of our acts, and, if they be evil to ourselves or others, we may justly infer that such a mode of indulging those passions is “not suited to our state or conformable to the will of God.” As moral agents, therefore, it is clearly our duty to restrain the indulgence of our passions in those particular directions, that by thus carefully examining their consequences, and by frequently bringing them to the test of utility, we may gradually acquire a habit of gratifying them only in the way which, being unattended with evil, will clearly “add to the sum of human happiness, and fulfil the apparent purpose of the Creator.”[750] All the moral codes which have laid down the subjection of the passions to reason have been really (thinks Malthus) built on this foundation, whether their promulgators were aware of it or not. “It is the test alone by which we can know independently of the revealed will of God whether a passion ought or ought not to be indulged, and is therefore the surest criterion of modern rules which can be collected from the light of nature.” In other words, our theological postulates lead us to control our passions so as to secure not merely our own individual happiness, but “the greatest sum of human happiness.” And the tendency of an action to promote or diminish the general happiness is our only criterion of its morality.[751] From this it directly follows that, because the free and indiscriminate indulgence of benevolence leads to the reverse of general happiness, we ought to practise a discriminating charity which blesses him that gives and him that takes. There is what Bastiat would call a harmony between the two.[752]