subject for direct observation and analysis, like
any other subject involving a series of living actions.

In these living actions everything is progressive. There are sudden
changes of character in what is called "conversion" which, at first,
hardly seem to come into line with the common laws of evolution. But
these changes have been long preparing, and it is just as much in the
order of nature that certain characters should burst all at once from
the rule of evil propensities, as it is that the evening primrose should
explode, as it were, into bloom with audible sound, as you may read in
Keats's Endymion, or observe in your own garden.

There is a continual tendency in men to fence in themselves and a few of
their neighbors who agree with them in their ideas, as if they were
an exception to their race. We must not allow any creed or religion
whatsoever to confiscate to its own private use and benefit the virtues
which belong to our common humanity. The Good Samaritan helped his
wounded neighbor simply because he was a suffering fellow-creature.
Do you think your charitable act is more acceptable than the Good
Samaritan's, because you do it in the name of Him who made the memory of
that kind man immortal? Do you mean that you would not give the cup
of cold water for the sake simply and solely of the poor, suffering
fellow-mortal, as willingly as you now do, professing to give it for the
sake of Him who is not thirsty or in need of any help of yours? We must
ask questions like this, if we are to claim for our common nature what
belongs to it.

The scientific study of man is the most difficult of all branches of
knowledge. It requires, in the first place, an entire new terminology
to get rid of that enormous load of prejudices with which every term
applied to the malformations, the functional disturbances, and the
organic diseases of the moral nature is at present burdened. Take that
one word Sin, for instance: all those who have studied the subject from
nature and not from books know perfectly well that a certain fraction
of what is so called is nothing more or less than a symptom of hysteria;
that another fraction is the index of a limited degree of insanity; that
still another is the result of a congenital tendency which removes the
act we sit in judgment upon from the sphere of self-determination,
if not entirely, at least to such an extent that the subject of the
tendency cannot be judged by any normal standard.