Moral restraint is a distinct form of preventive check. It is not to be confused with an impure celibacy, which falls under the head of vice; and yet the adjective “moral” does not imply that the motives are the highest possible.[96] The adjective is applied not so much to the motive of the action as to the action itself, from whatever motives proceeding; and in the mouth of a Utilitarian this language is not unphilosophical. Moral restraint, in the pages of Malthus, means simply continence; it is an abstinence from marriage followed by no irregularities.[97] He speaks of the “moral stimulus” of the bounty on corn, meaning the expectations it produced in the minds of men, as distinguished from the variations it produced in the prices of grain;[98] and the word “moral” is often, like “morale,” used in military matters to denote mental disposition, as distinguished from material resources. The vagueness of the word is perhaps not accidental, for nothing is vaguer than the mixed motives which it denotes; but continence, which is unambiguous, would seem the better word. With the enunciation of the third check the theory of Malthus entered definitively on a new phase; and in sketching the outlines of his work we shall no longer need to treat it as paradoxical and overstrained, but as a sober argument from the ground of accepted facts. The author’s analysis of human nature has been brought into harmony with common sense. He confesses that it had hitherto been too abstract, and had separated the inseparable. The mind of man cannot be sawed into quantities; and, even if it is possible to distinguish the mixed motives that guide human action, the fact remains that they only operate when together. It is probable that no good man’s motives were ever absolutely noble, and no bad man’s ever absolutely bestial. Even the good man is strongest when he can make his very circumstances war against his power to do evil. Mixed from the first of time, human motives will, in this world, remain mixed unto the last, whether in saint, sage, or savage. But civilization, involving, as it does, a progressive change in the dominant ideas of society, will alter the character of the mixture and the proportion of the elements. The laws of Malthus will be obeyed, though the name of Malthus be not mentioned, and the checks, physical or moral, be never brought to mind. Society, moving all together, if it move at all, cannot cure its evils by one single heroic remedy; but as little can it be content with self-denying ordinances, prohibitions, or refutations. It needs a positive truth, and an ideal, that is to say, a religion, to give new life to the bodily members by giving new hope to the heart. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, but the end of wisdom is the love of the Lord and the admiration of moral good.”[99] It follows that an economist, if he knows nothing but his economy, does not know even that.