ties. They have to do with what is. This instinct for the immediate has great hold among children and young people. It shows itself in their play, and in so much of their study as comes to anything. It is likewise the hall-mark of genius. Interest gives to life this present-moment vitality, and is at the bottom of all good and great things. It is an instinct that is entirely wholesome, this desire to bring effort and goal together, this persistent feeling that all our activities ought not only to lead somewhere, but should be an end and gratification in themselves. It is a legitimate revolt against such eternal preparation, against the constant putting into the future of the things that make up heaven. It is a legitimate demand, that for self-realization.

This praise of immediacy does not imply any return to a primitive life of impulse, any relinquishment of all those precious fruits of reflection and foresightedness which the labor and travail of the centuries have so painfully produced. One is under no such necessity. In the best of immediate action, impulse is tempered by thought. In the moral life, the desires of the heart are chastened and informed, but they express themselves with sincerity and directness. And furthermore, if the present moment be wisely spent, the gods themselves will not complain, for the future is assured. Immediacy as a moral

quality necessarily includes that ultimacy' which is often opposed to it and proclaimed the greater good. There is in reality no conflict. We can have no desirable ultimacy which does not grow out of a well-spent present, and we can have no moral immediacy which does not lead to an admirable future.

The high good fortune and large happiness, if enjoyed at all, must be immediate. We may accept either things or expectations as so many promises of good. We may linger over pleasant memories of the past. But good fortune and happiness are experiences, and as such they belong to the present.

W

XV

THE MORAL OUTLOOK

E have here a very human sort of morality. But it has this advantage over more academic and remote systems, that it is both sound and usable.

So intimate a scheme of morals could hardly escape the soundness which inheres in all genuine human experience. However partial and imperfect an empirical morality may appear to be when contrasted with the formal completeness of an outwardly imposed code, it has the inner witness of the spirit, the validity of an experienced fact. Such a morality may be incomplete, but so far as it goes, it is convincingly genuine. Its very incompleteness is a part of its soundness, for the story of human life is so far from being told that one has a feeling of having hardly entered upon the preface. There are intimations of what human life may be in the future, but the most valuable intimation of all is just that blind intimation which suggests that human life will be something more glorious and more beautiful than we have yet had the insight to conceive. So our present morality is but a prelude to that larger

morality into which the race is slowly growing. In the presence of this ideal and absolute morality, whose veiled figure occupies the future, none can be more conscious than we that we have here but touched the hem of her beautiful garment. The most that we can hope for is, that by even so slight a touch enough virtue is entered into us to inaugurate the one possible form of spiritual redemption, the redemption achieved through self-activity.

This human morality is eminently usable. It is not the morality of the chained beast, keeping alive in the heart the beast of unlawful desire, and depending for safety upon the doubtful strength of a conventional morality. It is a thoroughgoing redemption, a redemption to be carried out, not in spite of the heart's desire, but through the heart's desire. The thing to be redeemed is human nature, and the thing to redeem it is just this same human nature. An inner result can be gained only by an inner process. Human nature being what it is, the heart's desire is essentially for the things which the heart believes to be desirable. All men want good fortune. They have wanted it in the past; they do want it in the present; they will want it in the future. It is the psychological necessity of saints and sinners alike. If they ceased to want good fortune, they would cease to be men, cease indeed

to be conscious, sentient beings. Even the animals want good fortune, and through a rudimentary morality of experience, achieve it after a fashion. But all men who realize that good fortune is also the essential goal of morality are by necessity more eager to know and practice morality than the most austere moralist can be to press its precepts upon them.

So the process of moralizing and redeeming the human heart is the process of education, of enlightenment. It is an inner process, a change of heart, the revelation of a world larger and more beautiful than any world the heart has yet known. To be genuine, it must be voluntary, a purification of the heart's desires through knowledge, and not the compressing of desire into external and alien moulds. Men cannot be saved en masse by state or church or school, by any outer compulsion. They may not be thrust into the kingdom of heaven as cattle into fat pastures. If that were a good way, the great God would have done it long ago. But one by one, men enter the kingdom of the perfect life through the compulsion of their own desires. It is not a place, but a condition. It is never distant, never closed, never over-crowded. In its serene commodiousness there is always welcome.

This genuine morality is not the command of any institution or oracle. It is something for