is abundant in illustration of it. There
is no beauty of the ocean save in its shores--the margin of the
boundless expanse. Literary descriptions of the experiences of human
love are made up of descriptions of the margins of love. Married life is
depicted in courtship, and the sentiments of affection are described in
scenes of parting and meeting, which are the margins of companionship.

This principle should be fundamental in all policies of reconstruction
of religious and ethical institutions. In the training of men for
religious service and for ethical leadership they should be accustomed
to think in terms of communal wholes, and this thinking will use as its
units of measure the characteristics of the marginal life. It is for
this reason that temperance reform in America has been so influential
within the past two decades. It is a communal form of ethics. It demands
that the community should act together in safeguarding the weaker
members of the community, the young men, and the working people. The old
temperance propaganda was individualistist. It recorded its results in
the number of persons who signed the pledge. Its results were almost as
gratifying if the pledges were signed by well-doing and orderly people
as if they were signed by drunkards. The modern temperance movement
draws its influence from its proposed effect upon the agricultural
laborer.

The theological seminary of the past has been a literary institution.
During the period of its development the typical Christian was the
bright and aspiring young man in a community of boundless resources. To
such a man books are the interpreters of life. But in the modern period
with the congested population and close social organization, human
fellowship is an experience of greater value to most men than books.
Since the time of the invention of printing successive quantities of
literature have been given to the world, and under the law of
diminishing returns literature has come to have for many very small
returns. At the time of the Protestant Reformation the value of books in
the hands of the common people was infinite. For several generations
along with the extension of universal education this infinite value of
books continued for the people on the margin of the educated world. But
nowadays everybody in American progressive communities can read and
write: and in a universally educated population we arrive at the final
utility of books in human use. Great mas