n the petal of a spring violet and determines the symmetry
of living organisms; but it is one and unchanging, a fundamental pull in
the nature of matter itself. So with moral laws: they are not
superadded to life by some divine or other authority. They are simply
the fundamental principles in the nature of life itself, which we must
obey to grow and be happy.

If the moral order is one and unchanging, man does change in relation to
it, and moral standards are relative to the stage of his growth.
History is filled with illustrations of this relativity of ethical
standards.

For instance: human slavery doubtless began as an act of beneficence on
the part of some philanthropist well in advance of his age. The first
man who, in the dim dawn of history, said to the captive he had made in
war, "I will not kill you and eat you; I will let you live and work for
me the rest of your life": that man instituted human slavery; but it was
distinctly a step upward, from something that had been far worse.

Homer represents Ulysses as the favorite pupil of Pallas Athena, goddess
of wisdom: why? Baldly stated, because Ulysses was the shrewdest and
most successful liar in classic antiquity. If Ulysses were to appear in
a society of decent men to-day, he would be excluded from their
companionship, and for the same reason that led Homer to glorify him as
the favorite pupil of the goddess of wisdom. Thus what is a virtue at
one stage of development becomes a vice as man climbs to higher
recognition of the moral order.

Just because the moral standard is relative, it is absolutely binding
where it applies. In other words, if you see the light shining on your
path, you owe obedience to the light; one who does not see it, does not
owe obedience in the same way. If you do not obey your light, your
punishment is that you lose the light--degenerate to a lower plane, and
it is the worst punishment imaginable.

Thus the same act may be for the undeveloped life, non-moral, for the
developed, distinctly immoral. Before the instincts of personal modesty
and purity were developed, careless sex-promiscuity meant something
entirely different from what a descent to it means in our society. When
a man of some primitive tribe went out and killed a man of another
tribe, the action was totally different morally from .the murder by a
man of one community of a citizen of a neighboring town to-day.

This gradual elevation of moral standards, or gr