n those which the law
punishes with social degradation and the miseries of penal servitude.

"I wonder whether it has occurred to any of you who are listening to me
now--whether you are Christians, professed or real, atheists or
agnostics--to ask yourselves if, under the present conditions of what we
are pleased to call civilization, an honest world would be possible, and
that, I may say, is just the same thing as asking whether Christians can
or cannot live their lives in accordance with the teachings of Him who
went about doing good? Of course we all call ourselves honest, and some
of us really believe that we are. At any rate, most of us would feel
very much insulted if any one else told us that we were not. But are
we? Let us put our pride in our pockets for a moment and try to answer
that pregnant question. Honesty, like many other terms, of which
immorality is one, has, through its conventional use, acquired a very
restricted and therefore a quite unreal meaning. We have, by some
vicious process of thought, got accustomed to call a man or a woman who
transgresses the social law in a certain direction immoral, and in the
same way we have come to apply the word dishonesty to practices which
mean stealing or the attempt to steal property of a concrete form.

"But I think you will all agree with me that both these words have come
to be used in a sense which is so narrow, that it destroys their
original meaning. For every man or woman who transgresses the social law
and is therefore called immoral--of course after being found out--there
are a hundred or more who break the moral law every hour of their waking
lives. All of you, no doubt, possess bibles. Read the 27th and 28th
verses of the fifth chapter of the Gospel according to Matthew, and you
will understand what I mean.

"But there is another immorality than this, and, as I believe, a greater
immorality, for this, so far as it concerns our sister women, is often
not immorality at all. It is the surrender of a feeble nature to a
pitiless necessity, the necessity to live, the only alternative, in too
many cases, to self-murder. There is another immorality infinitely worse
than this, which when, as we Christians believe, the hosts of men are
ranged before the Bar of Eternal Justice will spell damnation, hopeless
and irrevocable, and that is the immorality which means a dishonesty
that deliberately deceives--not always for the purpose of gain, for this
kind of dishon