The Sources of Religious Insight Part 8

Let us here approach this problem from the side of our moral consciousness. For at this point we are already familiar with the religious need. Does there exist amongst men a type of morality that, in and for itself, is already essentially religious, so that it knows nothing of this conflict between duty and religion? I reply, there is such a type of morality. There is a sort of consciousness which equally demands of those whom it inspires, spiritual attainment and strenuousness, serenity and activity, resignation and vigour, life in the spirit and ceaseless enterprise in service. Is this form of consciousness something belonging only to highly and intellectually cultivated souls? Is it the fruit of abstract thinking alone? Is it the peculiar possession of the philosophers? Or, on the other hand, does it arise solely through dumb and inarticulate intuitions? Is it consistent only with a highly sensitive and mystical temperament? Does it belong only to the childhood of the spirit? Is it exclusively connected with the belief in some one creed? To all these questions I reply: No.

This sort of consciousness is possessed in a very {182} high degree by some of the humblest and least erudite of mankind. Those in whose lives it is a notable feature may be personally known only to a few near friends. But the spirit in which they live is the most precious of humanity's possessions. And such people may be found belonging to all the ages in which we can discover any genuinely humane activities, and to all those peoples that have been able to do great work, and to all the faiths that contain any recognisable element of higher religious significance.

III

I can best show you what I mean by next very briefly reviewing the motives upon which the idea of duty itself rests, and by then showing to what, upon the n.o.blest level of human effort, these motives lead.

Our moral interests have a development which, in all its higher phases, runs at least parallel to the development of our religious interests, even in cases where the two sorts of interests seem to clash. The moral problems arise through certain interactions that take place between our individual and our social experience. The reason reviews these interactions and takes interest in unifying our plan of life. The will is always, from the very nature of the case, concerned in the questions that here arise. For whatever else morality is, it is certain that your morality has to do with your conduct, and that {183} moral goodness cannot be yours unless your will itself is good. Wealth might come to you as a mere gift of fortune. Pleasure might be brought to you from without, so far as you have the mere capacity for pleasure. The same might appear to be true even in case of salvation, if, indeed, salvation is wholly due to saving grace. But moral goodness, if you can get it at all, requires your active cooperation.

You can earn it only in case you do something to possess it. Its motto reads: _"Erwirb es um es zu besitzen."_

Therefore the moral question always takes the form of asking: What am I to do? The first contribution to the answer is furnished, upon all levels of our self-consciousness, by our individual experience. And one apparently simple teaching that we get from this source may be stated in a maxim which wayward people often insist upon, but which only the very highest type of morality can rationally interpret: "I am to do what I choose, in case only I know what I choose and am able to do it." From this point of view, my only limitations, at first sight, seem to be those set for me by my physical weakness. There are many things that, if I had the power, I should or might choose to do. But since I frequently cannot accomplish my will, I must learn to limit myself to what I can carry out. So far, I say, our individual experience, if taken as our sole moral guide, seems at first to point out the way.

{184}

But this first teaching of our individual experience is by no means so simple as it seems. For the question arises: What is it, on the whole, that I choose to do? And, as we saw very early in these discussions, each of us is by nature so full of caprices and of various aims, that, left to ourselves, we live not only narrowly but inconsistently. Hence we spend much of our lives in finding out, after the fact, that what we chose to do at one moment of our lives has hopelessly thwarted what we intended to do at some other moment. Self-will then, left to itself, means self-defeat. That is the lesson of life. And the question: What is it that, on the whole, I would choose to do if I had the power? is a question that individual experience, taken by itself, never answers in any steadily consistent way. Therefore, as we all sooner or later come to see, one of our most persistent limitations is not our physical weakness to accomplish what we choose, but our incapacity, when left to ourselves, to find out what it is that we propose and really choose to do. Therefore, just because individual experience, taken by itself, never gives steady guidance, we have to look elsewhere for a rule.

The question: What am I to do? is never in practice answered without consulting, more or less persistently, our social experience. Being what we are, naturally gregarious, imitative, and, when trained, conventional creatures, who, indeed, often fight with our kind, but who also love our kind, who not only {185} cannot bear to be too much alone, but are simply helpless when wholly isolated from our fellows (unless we have already learned in their company the very arts that we may be able to use while we are alone), we can give no answer to the question: What is to be my choice? without pretty constantly consulting our social interests. And these interests are indeed plentiful and absorbing. But they too are naturally conflicting. And so, taken as they come, they give us no rule of life.

To be sure, the social will in general says to us: "Live with your fellows, for you cannot do without them. Learn from them how to live; for you have to live more or less in their way. Imitate them, co-operate with them, at least enough to win such ideas as will help you to know what you want and such skill as will make you best able to accomplish whatever, in view of your social training, you are led to choose. Do not oppose them too much, for they are many, and, if stirred up against you, can easily destroy you. Conform, then, to their will enough to get power to have your own way." And so far our ordinary social will gives us more or less consistent counsel. But beyond such really rather barren advice (the counsel of an inane worldly prudence), our social experience, as it daily comes to us, has no single ideal to furnish, no actually universal rules to lay down.

For, as I go about in social relations, sometimes I love my fellows and sometimes I feel antipathy for them. Sometimes {186} I am full of pity for their woes and long to help them. Sometimes they are my rivals; and I then naturally try to crush them. There is thus no one social tendency that, as it comes to us in the course of our ordinary social experience, gives us sufficient guidance to tell us how to escape self-defeat. For my love and pity war with my social greed and with my rivalries. I am so far left to my chaos.

Thus, then, if I sum up my position, I indeed propose to do what I choose, in so far as I am able, and in so far as I can find out what it is that I choose and can avoid thwarting myself by my own choices.

And the art of learning how to choose, and what to choose, and how to carry out my will, is for me, since I am gregarious, imitative, and conventionalised, a social art. But, on the other hand, no social art that I ordinarily learn is sufficient either to teach me my whole purpose in life, or to make a consistent self of me, or to lead me out of that chaos of self-thwarting efforts wherein so many men pa.s.s their lives.

IV

You already know, from our former discussion, how our reason views the situation thus created by this chaos of social and of individual interests. How real and how confused this chaos is, the daily record of certain aspects of the ordinary social life of men which you see in each morning's newspaper {187} may serve to ill.u.s.trate. These princes and peoples, these rebels and executioners, these strikers and employers, these lovers and murderers, these traders and bankrupts, these who seem for the moment to triumph and these who just now appear to be ground under the opponent's or the oppressor's heel, what arts of living were they and are they all following? Well, each in his way appears to have been choosing to have his own will; yet each, being a social creature, had learned from his fellows all his vain little arts of life. Each loved some of his fellows and was the rival of others.

Each had his standards of living, standards due to some more or less accidental and unstable union of all the motives thus barely suggested. The news of the day tells you how some of these won their aims, for the moment, while others were thwarted. What I ask you to note, and what the reason of every man in his more enlightened moments shows him, is that each of these who at any moment was thwarted, precisely in so far as he had any will of his own at all, was defeated not only by his fellows, but by himself. For this special will of his was some caprice not large enough to meet his own ends. The career, for instance, of that man who failed in love or in business or in politics is wrecked. His reputation is lost. Well, it was his will, as a social being, to aim at just such a career and to value just that sort of reputation. Had he chosen to be a hermit, or a saint, or a Stoic, what would just such {188} a career and such a reputation have been to him? How could he have lost unless he had sought? And his failure, to what was it due? No doubt to some choice of his own quite as much as to his rival's skill. He wanted freedom to carry on his own speculations. He got that freedom and lost his fortune. He wanted to be free to choose whom and how to love. He had his way and defeated his own aim. He chose to follow his ambitions. They have led him where he is.

Such are perfectly reasonable reflections upon the course of ordinary social conflicts. They suggest to our more considerate moments the very sort of reflection which, at the outset of the present discussion, led us to define the religious ideal of salvation. Only now this type of reflection appears as aiming to lead us to some practical rule for guiding our active life. For our attention is now fixed, not on a condition to be called salvation, but on a rule for doing something in accordance with our own true will. This rule is, negatively stated, the following: Do _not_ seek, either in your individual self as you are or in your social experience as it comes, for the whole truth either about what your own will is or about how you can get your aims. For if you confine yourself to such sources of moral insight, you will go on thwarting yourself quite as genuinely, even if by good luck, not quite as scandalously, as the bankrupt speculators and the strikers and the outcast oppressors, and the politicians {189} and the murderers, and the deposed monarchs and the defeated revolutionists, of whom you read in the newspapers, have thwarted both their individual and their social will. In brief: Put not your trust in caprices, either individual or social. On the positive side, the rule here in question is: In order to find out what is your true choice, and how you can live without thwarting yourself, make your _principle_ of life such that whatever fortune besets you, you can inwardly say: "I have not really failed, for I have acted as I intended, and also as I still intend to act, and have had my will whatever the consequences that fortune has brought to me, or however my momentary mood happens to change, or however this or that social caprice leads men to love or to despise me." Such is the moral insight that the first use of your reason, in thus reviewing life, suggests.

Or, as the moral common-sense of the wise has often stated the rule here in question: So act that, upon any calm review of the sense of your individual and of your social life, you shall never have ground to regret the principle of your action, never have ground to say: "By choosing thus I thwarted my own will."

As you hear these statements, I hope that, reduced to their very lowest terms: _"So act as never to have reason to regret the principle of your action,"_ they express a sort of counsel for life which is not strange to common-sense, even if it has received an abstract expression in the famous ethical philosophy of Kant. {190} Only, as you will rightly insist, this counsel is indeed a seemingly hopeless counsel of perfection when it is addressed to the natural man, who merely has taken his instincts as he found them developing, and his social world as he has felt it fascinating or disturbing him, and who has then stumbled on, more or less prudently and obstinately trying to find out what it really is that he wants to do in life. Such a man will cry out: "But how shall I discover a principle of life such that, if I hold thereto, I shall never, upon any reasonable survey of life, regret following that principle?"

V

Here at length let life itself answer the question. As I was preparing these very words, and thinking what new instance to choose, in order to ill.u.s.trate afresh the very principle that I have in mind, the newspaper of the day, side by side with its usual chronicle of unreason and of disaster, reported the approaching end of a public servant. This public servant was Ida Lewis, who for fifty years was the official keeper of the Lime Rock lighthouse in Narragansett Bay.

She had been known for more than fifty years for her early and later often-repeated heroism as a life-saver. And now she was at last on her death-bed. She has since died. I know nothing of her career but what public reports have told. So far as her duty required her at her post, {191} she kept her light burning through all the nights and the storms of those many years. She saved, in all, upon various occasions, eighteen lives of those who were in danger from wreck. Her occupation thus had its perils. It had, what must have been much harder to endure, its steady call upon daily fidelity. It was, on the whole, an obscure and humble occupation; although by chance, as well as by reason of her skill and devotion, this particular lighthouse keeper was privileged to become in a sense famous. But certainly it could have been no part of her original plan to pursue a famous career. When we seek public prominence we do not select the calling of the lighthouse keeper. I do not know how she came to find this calling.

She may not even have chosen it. But she certainly chose how to live her life when she had found it. What it means for the world to have such lives lived, a very little thought will show us. What spirit is needed to live such lives as they should be lived, we seldom consider, until such a public servant, dying with the fruits of her years to some extent known to the public, reminds us of our debt and of her devotion.

The newspaper in which I read of this case, in commenting upon its significance, also reported (I do not know how accurately), this incident, of which some of you may know more than I do. I quote the words: [Footnote: _Boston Evening Transcript,_ October 23, 1911.]

"Forty-one years ago, Daniel Williams, keeper of {192} the light at Little Traverse Bay, in Lake Michigan, went out in a boat for the rescue of a s.h.i.+p's crew in distress, and did not come back alive.

For three days the storm continued. But his sorrowing widow did not forget other lives, and each night climbed the winding stairs and trimmed the lamp. This duty she discharged until the government learned the situation, when it authorised her to continue. And she is still at her post."

Lighthouse keepers are not the only people who live thus. There are countless lights kept alive in homes where want or weariness or stormy sorrow have long since and often entered, and have again and again seemed about to overwhelm, but where, after many years, faithful souls, well known to many of you, are, despite fortune, still at their post, with the light burning.

And now, I ask you, What is the spirit which rules such lives? It is a spirit which is familiar in song and story; for men always love to tell about it when they meet with impressive examples of its workings.

What I regret is that, when men repeat such songs and stories, familiarity breeds, not indeed contempt (for our whole nature rejoices to think of such deeds), but a certain tendency to false emphasis. We notice the dramatic and heroic incidents of such lives, and are charmed with the picturesque or with the thrilling features of the tale. And so we seem to ourselves to be dealing mainly with anecdotes and with accidents. We fail {193} sufficiently to consider that back of the exceptional show of heroism there has to be the personal character, itself the result of years of devotion and of training-- the character that has made itself ready for these dramatic but, after all, not supremely significant opportunities. Only when we in mind run over series of such cases do we see that we are dealing with a spirit suited not only to great occasions, but to every moment of reasonable life, and not only to any one or two callings, but to all sorts and conditions of men.

The spirit in question is the one which is often well ill.u.s.trated in the lives of warriors who willingly face death for their flag--if only they face death not merely as brutes may also face it (because their fighting blood is aroused), but as reasonable men face death who clearly see what conditions make it "man's perdition to be safe."

There are two tests by which we may know whether the warriors really have the spirit of which I am speaking, namely, the spirit that was also, and quite equally, present in the widow who, in all the agony of a new grief, and through the storm that had taken away her husband, still climbed the lonely stairway and trimmed the lamp which he could never again tend. The first test that the warrior and the lighthouse tender are moved by the same spirit is furnished by the fact that those warriors who are rightly filled with this spirit are as well able to live by it in peace as in war; are, for instance, able even to surrender to {194} the foe, when fortune and duty require them to do so--to surrender, I say, with the same calm dignity and unbroken courage that Lee showed in his interview with Grant at Appomattox, and that inspired him in the years of defeat and of new toils through which he had still to live after the war. That is, the warrior, if rightly inspired, is as ready for life as for death, is as ready for peace as for war; and despises defeat as much as danger--fearing only sloth and dishonour and abandonment of the service. The other test is whether the warrior is ready to recognise and to honour, with clear cordiality, this same spirit when it is manifested in another calling, or in another service, and, in particular, is manifested by his enemy.

For then the warrior knows that warfare itself is only the accident of fortune, and that the true spirit of his own act is one which could be manifested without regard to the special occasion that has required him to face death just here or to fight on this side. If the spirit of the warrior bears these tests, his faithfulness is of the type that could be shown as well by the lonely light-tender in her grief as by the hero for whom glory waits. And again, this spirit is the very one that martyrs have shown when they died for their faith; that patient mothers and fathers, however obscure and humble, show when they toil, in true devotion, for their homes; that lovers mean to express when they utter such words as the ones which we earlier quoted from Mrs.

Browning. And lest all these {195} instances should impress you with the idea that the spirit in question has to do only with brilliant emotional colourings, such as those which fill our imaginations when we think of war, and of brave deaths, and of heroic triumph over grief, and of lovers' vows, let me turn at once to what some of you may think to be the other extreme of life. Let me say that, to my mind, the calm and laborious devotion to a science which has made possible the life-work of a Newton, or of a Maxwell, or of a Darwin is still another example, and a very great example, of this same spirit--an example full of the same strenuousness, the same fascinated love of an idealised object, and, best of all, full of the willingness to face unknown fortunes, however hard, and to abandon, when that is necessary, momentary joys, however dear, in a pursuit of one of the princ.i.p.al goods which humanity needs--namely, an understanding of the wonderful world in which we mortals are required to work out our destiny. It is not a superficial resemblance that the lighthouse tender and the scientific man both seek to keep and to spread light for the guidance of men.

The lighthouse tender, the mother, the warrior, the patriot, the martyr, the true lover, the scientific investigator--they all may show, I insist, this same essential spirit,

"Patient through the watches long, Serving most with none to see;"

{196} superior to fortune because something that is worthier than any fortune seems to call them to their task. Such are undismayed in defeat. So Newton was undismayed when he looked for the needed confirmation of his theory in the motion of the moon and for the time failed. He worked on steadily, without any effort to win renown by hasty publication of possible explanations, until new advances of science showed why confirmation had so far been lacking and brought him what he needed. So Lee turned to the new life after the war. So the widow climbed the lonely stairway, despite her lost one, and because of her lost one. So the martyrs faced the lions. These all were sustained through long toil, or bewildering grief, by a spirit that tended to make them masters of their own lives and to bring them into unity with the master of all life.

We have ill.u.s.trated the spirit. We now ask: What is the principle which dominates such lives? Is it or is it not a principle such, that one at any time wholly devoted to it could thereafter, upon a reasonable review of life, wisely regret having chosen to live thus?

If it is not such a principle, if on the contrary it is a principle such that any reasonable view of life approves it, let us know what it is, let us detach it from the accidental conditions which at once adorn and disguise it for our imagination, let us read it so as to see how it applies to every sort of reasonable life--and then we shall be in possession {197} of the solution of our moral problem. Then we shall know what it is that, if we are indeed rational, we really choose to do so soon as we learn how to live.

VI

If we consider carefully any such faithful lives as I have just exemplified, we see that, however simple-minded and unreflective some of the people may be who learn to live in this way, the motives that guide them are such as will bear a great deal of thoughtful reflection.

The people whom I have in mind, and of whom such instances teach us something, are, in the first place, individuals of considerable wealth and strength of personal character. They certainly are resolute. They have a will of their own. They make choices. And so the contribution of their individual experience to their moral purpose is large. It would be wrong to say, as some do, that they are characterised by mere "altruism," by utter "self-forgetfulness," by "living solely for others." If you were on a wreck in a storm, and the lighthouse keeper were coming out to save you, you would take little comfort in the belief, if you had such a belief, that, since he was a man who had always "lived for others," he had never allowed himself the selfish delight of being fond of handling a boat with skill or of swimming for the mere love of the water. No, on the contrary, you would rejoice to believe, if you {198} could, that he had always delighted in boating and in swimming, and was justly vain of his prowess on the water. The more of a self he had delightedly or with a just pride trained on the water, the more of a self he might have to save you with. When we are in desperate need, we never wish beings who, as some say, "have no thought of self" to help us in our plight. We want robust helpers who have been trained through their personal fondness for the skill and the prowess that they can now show in helping us. So individual self-development belongs of necessity to the people whose faithfulness we are to prize in an emergency. And if people resolve to become effectively faithful in some practical service, their principle of action includes individual self-development.

In the second place, people of the type whom I here have in mind have strong social motives. Their faithfulness is a recognition of the significance, in their eyes, of some socially important call. And this, of course, is too obvious a fact to need further mention.

But in the third place, these people are guided by a motive which distinguishes their type of social consciousness from the chance and fickle interests in this or that form of personal and social success which I exemplified a short time since. A peculiar grace has been indeed granted to them--a free gift, but one which they can only accept by being ready to earn it--a precious treasure that they cannot {199} possess without loving and serving the life that has thus endowed them--a talent which they cannot hide, but must employ to earn new usury--a talent which seems to them not to belong to themselves, but to their master, who will require it of them, increased. This grace, this gift, is what may be called their Cause. Sometimes it appears to them in winning guise, seen in the depths of the eyes of a beloved one, or symbolised by a flag, or expressed through a song.

Sometimes they think of it more austerely, and name it "science," or "the service," or "the truth." Sometimes they conceive it expressly as a religious object, and call it, not unwisely, "G.o.d's will." But however they conceive it, or whatever name they give to it, it has certain features by which you may easily know it.

The Cause, for people of this spirit, is never one individual person alone, even if, as in the lover's case, the devoted person centres it about the self of one beloved. For even the lovers know that they transfigure the beloved being, and speak of their love in terms that could not be true, unless that which they really serve were much more than any one individual. The Cause for any such devoted servant of a cause as we have been describing _is some conceived, and yet also real, spiritual unity which links many individual lives in one, and which is therefore essentially superhuman, in exactly the sense in which we found the realities of the world of the reason to be superhuman._ Yet the cause is not, on that {200} account, any mere abstraction. It is a live something: "My home," "my family," "my country," "my service," "mankind," "the church," "my art," "my Science," "the cause of humanity," or, once more, "G.o.d's will,"--such are names for the cause. One thinks of all these objects as living expressions of what perfectly concrete and needy people want and require. But one also thinks of the cause as unifying many individuals in its service, and as graciously furnis.h.i.+ng to them what they need, namely, the opportunity to be one in spirit. The cause, then, is something based upon human needs, and inclusive of human efforts, and alive with all the warmth of human consciousness and of human love and desire and effort. One also thinks of the cause as _superhuman in the scope, the wealth, the unity, and the reasonableness of its purposes and of its accomplishments._

Such is the cause. That the individual loves it is, in any one case, due to the chances of his temperament and of his development. That it can be conceived and served is a matter of social experience. That it is more worthy to be served than are any pa.s.sing whims, individual or social, is the insight which the individual gets whenever he surveys his life in its wider unities. That to serve it requires creative effort; that it cannot be served except by positive deeds is the result of all one's knowledge of it. That in such service one finds self-expression even in and through self-surrender, and is more of a self even because one gives one's {201} self, is the daily experience of all who have found such a cause. That such service enables one to face fortune with a new courage, because, whatever happens to the servant of the cause, he is seeking not his own fortune, but that of the cause, and has therefore discounted his own personal defeats, is the result of the whole spirit here in question.

For such a practical att.i.tude toward such a cause I know no better name than the good old word Loyalty. And hereupon we are ready for a statement of the principle which dominates loyal lives. All the foregoing cases were cases of loyalty. In each some one had found a cause, a live spiritual unity, above his own individual level. This cause is no mere heap or collection of other human beings; it is a life of many brethren in unity. The simplest statement of the principle of the loyal person was the maxim: _"Be loyal to your cause."_ Somewhat more fully stated this principle would read: _"Devote your whole self to your cause."_ Such a principle does not mean "Lose yourself," or "Abolish yourself," or even simply "Sacrifice yourself." It means: "Be as rich and full and strong a self as you can, and then, with all your heart and your soul and your mind and your strength, devote yourself to this your cause, to this spiritual unity in which individuals may be, and (when they are loyal) actually are, united in a life whose meaning is above the separate meanings of any or of all natural human beings."

{202}

Yet even thus the principle which actually inspires every thoroughly loyal action has not been fully stated. For, as we have seen, the warriors, despite the fact that their duty requires them to compa.s.s if they can the defeat of their foes, best show their loyal spirit if they prize the loyalty of their foes and honour loyalty wherever they find it. We call such a spirit that honours loyalty in the foe a spirit of chivalry. You and I may remember that Lee was the foe of that Union in whose triumph we now rejoice. Yet we may and should look upon him as, in his own personal intent, a model of the spirit of true loyalty; for he gave all that he had and was to what he found to be his cause. Such an insight into the meaning of the loyalty of the foe, chivalry requires. Therefore, the true spirit of loyalty, including, as is reasonable, this spirit of chivalry, also requires us to state the principle of loyalty in a still deeper and more universal form.

The true principle of loyalty is, in fact, an union of two principles.

The first is: _Be loyal._ The second is: _So be loyal, that is, so seek, so accept, so serve your cause that thereby the loyalty of all your brethren throughout all the world, through your example, through your influence, through your own love of loyalty wherever you find it, as well as through the sort of loyalty which you exemplify in your deeds, shall be aided, furthered, increased so far as in you lies._

Can this principle be acted out? Can it direct life? Is it a barren abstraction? Let the life and {203} the deed of the lonely lighthouse keeper give the reply. Who, amongst us, whatever his own cause, is not instructed and aided in his loyalty by the faithful deed of such a devoted soul? Such people are then, in truth, not loyal _merely_ to their own private cause. _They are loyal to the cause of all loyal people._ For, to any enlightened survey of life, all the loyal, even when chance and human blindness force them at any moment to war with one another, are, in fact, spiritual brethren. They have a common cause--the cause of furthering universal loyalty through their own choice and their own service. The spirit of chivalry simply brings this fact to mind. The loyal are inspired by the loyal, are sustained by them. Every one of them finds in the loyal his kindred, his fellow-servants. Whoever is concretely loyal, that is, whoever wholly gives himself to some cause that binds many human souls in one superhuman unity, is just in so far serving the cause not only of all mankind, but of all the rational spiritual world. I repeat then: The true principle of all the loyal is: _So be loyal to your own cause as thereby to serve the advancement of the cause of universal loyalty._

Now of the principle thus formulated I a.s.sert that it is a principle fit to be made the basis of an universal moral code. There is no duty, there is no virtue whose warrant and whose value you cannot deduce from this one principle. Charity, justice, fidelity, decisiveness, strenuousness, truthfulness, {204} efficiency, wise self-a.s.sertion, watchful self-restraint, patience, defiance of fortune, resignation in defeat, your daily social duties, your individual self-development, your personal rights and dignity, your obedience to the calls of duty, your justified self-sacrifices, your rational pride in the unique moral office to which you have individually been called--all these, I a.s.sert, can be rightly defined, defended, estimated, and put into practice through an accurate understanding and development of the principle of loyalty just laid down.

Since I am, indeed, speaking of sources of insight, and am not portraying at any length their results, you will not expect of me a deduction of such a moral code here. But this a.s.sertion of mine is no mere boast. I have repeatedly endeavoured, elsewhere, to portray loyalty and to apply its principles to life. For the moment it suffices to ask you to consider the lives of the loyal, in such examples as I have suggested to you, and to try for yourselves to see what they teach. To help you in such a consideration, I may here simply remind you that when one is not only loyal but enlightened, one cannot finally approve or accept any cause or any mode of living that, while seeming in itself to be a cause or a mode of living such as embodies the spirit of loyalty, still depends upon or involves contempt for the loyalty of other men, or a disposition to prey upon their loyalty and to deprive them of any cause to which they can be loyal. No loyalty that lives by {205} destroying the loyalty of your neighbour is just to its own true intent. And that is why charity and justice are fruits of the loyal spirit. And that is why, if your cause and your loyal action are rightly accepted and carried out, the common interests of all rational beings are served by your loyalty precisely in so far as your powers permit. Whatever your special cause (and your special personal cause--your love, your home, or your calling--you must have), _your true cause is the spiritual unity of all the world of reasonable beings._ This cause you further, so far as in you lies, by your every deed.

And that also is why the principle of loyalty, once rightly defined and served by you--served with the whole energy and power of your personal self--is a principle that, upon any enlightened survey of your life you can never regret having served. This, then, is what we were seeking--an absolute moral principle, a guide for all action.