, then it is selling
a birthright for a mess of pottage to abandon hopes so rich and
generous, merely in order to avoid the passing and casual penalties of
social disapproval. And there is a double evil in this kind of flinching
from obedience to the voice of our better selves, whether it takes the
form of absolute suppression of what we think and hope, or only of
timorous and mutilated presentation. We lose not only the possible
advantage of the given change. Besides that, we lose also the certain
advantage of maintaining or increasing the amount of conscientiousness
in the world. And everybody can perceive the loss incurred in a society
where diminution of the latter sort takes place. The advance of the
community depends not merely on the improvement and elevation of its
moral maxima, but also on the quickening of moral sensibility. The
latter work has mostly been effected, when it has been effected on a
large scale, by teachers of a certain singular personal quality. They do
nothing to improve the theory of conduct, but they have the art of
stimulating men to a more enthusiastic willingness to rise in daily
practice to the requirements of whatever theory they may accept. The
love of virtue, of duty, of holiness, or by whatever name we call this
powerful sentiment, exists in the majority of men, where it exists at
all, independently of argument. It is a matter of affection, sympathy,
association, aspiration. Hence, even while, in quality, sense of duty is
a stationary factor, it is constantly changing in quantity. The amount
of conscience in different communities, or in the same community at
different times, varies infinitely. The immediate cause of the decline
of a society in the order of morals is a decline in the quantity of its
conscience, a deadening of its moral sensitiveness, and not a
depravation of its theoretical ethics. The Greeks became corrupt and
enfeebled, not for lack of ethical science, but through the decay in the
numbers of those who were actually alive to the reality and force of
ethical obligations. Mahometans triumphed over Christians in the East
and in Spain--if we may for a moment isolate moral conditions from the
rest of the total circumstances--not because their scheme of duty was
more elevated or comprehensive, but because their respect for duty was
more strenuous and fervid.

The great importance of leaving this priceless element in a community
as free, as keen, and as active as possible, i