n to tell them,
except in a very general way, what it is: and that we need a doctrine of
ethics, carefully followed out, to _interpret_ to us the will of God.
Whether this opinion is correct or not, it is superfluous here to
discuss; since whatever aid religion, either natural or revealed, can
afford to ethical investigation, is as open to the utilitarian moralist
as to any other. He can use it as the testimony of God to the usefulness
or hurtfulness of any given course of action, by as good a right as
others can use it for the indication of a transcendental law, having no
connexion with usefulness or with happiness.

Again, Utility is often summarily stigmatized as an immoral doctrine by
giving it the name of Expediency, and taking advantage of the popular
use of that term to contrast it with Principle. But the Expedient, in
the sense in which it is opposed to the Right, generally means that
which is expedient for the particular interest of the agent himself: as
when a minister sacrifices the interest of his country to keep himself
in place. When it means anything better than this, it means that which
is expedient for some immediate object, some temporary purpose, but
which violates a rule whose observance is expedient in a much higher
degree. The Expedient, in this sense, instead of being the same thing
with the useful, is a branch of the hurtful. Thus, it would often be
expedient, for the purpose of getting over some momentary embarrassment,
or attaining some object immediately useful to ourselves or others, to
tell a lie. But inasmuch as the cultivation in ourselves of a sensitive
feeling on the subject of veracity, is one of the most useful, and the
enfeeblement of that feeling one of the most hurtful, things to which
our conduct can be instrumental; and inasmuch as any, even
unintentional, deviation from truth, does that much towards weakening
the trustworthiness of human assertion, which is not only the principal
support of all present social well-being, but the insufficiency of which
does more than any one thing that can be named to keep back
civilisation, virtue, everything on which human happiness on the largest
scale depends; we feel that the violation, for a present advantage, of a
rule of such transcendent expediency, is not expedient, and that he who,
for the sake of a convenience to himself or to some other individual,
does what depends on him to deprive mankind of the good, and inflict
upon them the evil