to trace their individual
responsibility for what they are. But the determination of the value
of mankind, even the lowest, is by a different process from that of the
speculative intellect. Are men worthy of love? Love them, and you
shall know! The attitude of love vindicates itself. No one who has
heartily given himself to the service of others turns back saying,
"They are not worth it."

Encompassing light creates in the developing creature an eye. So
encompassing love--human love--draws out response in its object, makes
it lovable.

One class of truths are certain for all and at all times. These are
such as: the excellence and authority of the highest moral ideal; the
obligations of purity, truth, and honesty; love as the true attitude;
receptivity toward knowledge, beauty, and humor.

There are other perceptions which vary greatly in their frequency and
vividness. They are impulses of reassurance, joy, hope, victory. They
surpass all other sources of strength and comfort.

They cannot, in their clearness and fullness, be transferred or
expressed; they cannot even, by the mind experiencing them, be resolved
into intellectual propositions.

They are not peculiar to what we usually call religion. The experience
of love between man and woman opens a new world. So does music; so do
all the finer forms of happiness.

All these, when they come, are felt as gifts,--as revelations. They
are not within our direct and immediate command.

What relation do they bear to the life which is within our command,--to
our deliberate, purposeful, self-ordered life? First, in that life we
cultivate the two traits which fit us for the vision, though they do
not command it,--sensitiveness and self-control.

So no man or woman can foresee whether the love of wedlock shall come
to them, but each can render himself worthy of love, and no high
experience of love is possible except to one trained long beforehand in
purity and unselfishness.

Next, these higher moods, when they come, should be accepted as giving
law to the unillumined hours. They do not change, but they intensify,
the aim at rightness of life, and they add to it the spirit of courage,
of trust, of joy.

The hope of immortality--the assurance of some good beyond, which we
express by "immortality"--is born from a sense of the value of life.
Life is felt to be precious as it is consecrated by the moral struggle
in ourselves, and as it is viewed in oth