practicable only because men of brains, as well as day-laborers, sell their time and strength and honor for a wage.

What is needed is a more tonic view of life generally, more courage. We can afford to run some little risk of hunger and cold and nakedness, if by so doing we may save our souls alive. But really there is very little danger of starving. Your strong, merry, reverent soul has a better chance than the craven, for after, all, the world loves a man better than a slave. It is cowardice, not necessity, that robs men of independence and self-possession. Practically the wage-taker says: 'It is really too much of a responsibility, this getting of food and clothing and shelter. I am not equal to it. Assure me of these, I shall not be over-particular about the quality, - and you may have the cream of my time and strength; you may have the major part of my manhood, and you may make what you can out of it!' He is afraid to paddle his own canoe, and so pulls an oar in the galleys. It is a national misfortune that this is the situation of the great majority of our people to-day. And it is a still greater misfortune that when they do organize, the object is not a manly independence, but a larger wage, an increased class consciousness! They are workmen first, wage-earners, slaves for eight to twelve hours each working day, and

only incidentally men. It is true that the masses are ignorant, but they will remain ignorant so long as they are patted on the back and made to believe that this state of things is wholesome, this abdication of true manhood, this denial of the moral life.

For morality says that occupations must be significant, not frivolous; must be health-giving, not health-taking; must be self-chosen, not imposed; must be educative, not deadening; must be sources of happiness and delight, not of mortal weariness and despair. If a man's occupation fail to be this, no matter what the wage or socalled profit, it is not a moral occupation, and the man himself is not a moral person.

XIV

IMMEDIACY

ORALITY is commonly supposed to be the

MOR

enemy of impulse, the friend of reflection. Such a view is a logical result of the doctrine of total depravity, original sin, and the shadow-view of life generally. Impulse shows the real man, just as he is, and the real man being evil, all impulsive action must be doubtful, if not absolutely immoral. With reflective action, it is different, they say. Moral conduct, being the opposite of what we naturally want to do, a conflict indeed with our genuine desires, can be forthcoming only when reflection discredits impulse and points out the better way.

It has been our purpose to present a conception of morality far saner and sweeter than this morality of the chained beast. Impulse is often wrong, sometimes sadly wrong; but the genuine remedy lies not in flouting it, but in chastening and purifying it, enlisting impulse on the side of the right, and then following it. This method is presented both as a more rational method and as the only thoroughgoing method of making a man essentially moral. It is the method of so

great a moral teacher as Jesus, the method of purifying the heart's desires and so entering into the kingdom. He that hateth his brother is the murderer; he that lusteth is the fornicator.

Morality holds a man accountable for the outer act more than the inner state, if any discrepancy be possible; but the man himself, to be a moral person, must concern himself most vitally and primarily with the heart's desires, for out of these the act emerges. Salvation is a process of informing the heart, of teaching it to turn to the sources of genuine and lasting happiness. The saviours of the race have made this appeal and rendered this service. Commonly, they have turned the attention inward, have made good fortune consist in human, spiritual possessions rather than in things. Yet so subjective a teacher as Jesus did not hesitate to declare that, the kingdom once found, all else would follow. But the primal good fortune was the inner state symbolized by the kingdom. To be saved, from this point of view, is not to want to do the wrong thing, sometimes the very wrong thing, and to desire it fiercely, and yet by God's grace to go haltingly and half-heartedly and do the right thing, but rather by God's grace not to want to do the wrong thing, to want indeed to do the right thing, and to want it in fuller and fuller measure. This seems to me the only sincere and

well-bred sort of goodness, and all else a miserable hypocrisy.

To save myself, and therefore to save that part of society for which I am directly responsible, I must do three things. I must blot out all impulses and desires that are evil. It is negative work, rather a dull sort of weeding in the garden of the heart, and not calculated to arouse any great enthusiasm, but it is very necessary. And it must be a root-and-branch tearing out, not any mere pruning and half measures. It is a sort of gardening that never quite ends. Higher and lower are relative terms. Desires that are good at one time may cease to be good as one advances to higher levels. One must so live as to see this and be sensitive to the outgrown chapters of one's life.

Then I must cultivate the impulses and desires that are good, make habits of them, for the garden devoid of wheat is hardly better than a garden full of tares. Morality cannot be built out of mere negations, of omitted evil. It must be built out of positive good. At bottom, it is this thought that makes the sturdier moralists among us so impatient of the goody-goody people, the people who count as good simply because they have not energy and life enough to be bad. But morality, as we have seen, has no word of approbation for this human colorlessness. It requires