ure
you I am not. For I know the human race's limitations, and this makes it
my duty--my pleasant duty--to be fair to it. Each person in it is honest
in one or several ways, but no member of it is honest in all the ways
required by--by what? By his own standard. Outside of that, as I look at
it, there is no obligation upon him.

Am I honest? I give you my word of honor (private) I am not. For seven
years I have suppressed a book which my conscience tells me I ought
to publish. I hold it a duty to publish it. There are other difficult
duties which I am equal to, but I am not equal to that one. Yes, even I
am dishonest. Not in many ways, but in some. Forty-one, I think it is.
We are certainly all honest in one or several ways--every man in the
world--though I have reason to think I am the only one whose black-list
runs so light. Sometimes I feel lonely enough in this lofty solitude.

Yes, oh, yes, I am not overlooking the "steady progress from age to age
of the coming of the kingdom of God and righteousness." "From age to
age"--yes, it describes that giddy gait. I (and the rocks) will not live
to see it arrive, but that is all right--it will arrive, it surely will.
But you ought not to be always ironically apologizing for the Deity.
If that thing is going to arrive, it is inferable that He wants it to
arrive; and so it is not quite kind of you, and it hurts me, to see you
flinging sarcasms at the gait of it. And yet it would not be fair in
me not to admit that the sarcasms are deserved. When the Deity wants
a thing, and after working at it for "ages and ages" can't show even a
shade of progress toward its accomplishment, we--well, we don't laugh,
but it is only because we dasn't. The source of "righteousness"--is in
the heart? Yes. And engineered and directed by the brain? Yes. Well,
history and tradition testify that the heart is just about what it was
in the beginning; it has undergone no shade of change. Its good and evil
impulses and their consequences are the same today that they were in Old
Bible times, in Egyptian times, in Greek times, in Middle Age times, in
Twentieth Century times. There has been no change.

Meantime, the brain has undergone no change. It is what it always was.
There are a few good brains and a multitude of poor ones. It was so in
Old Bible times and in all other times--Greek, Roman, Middle Ages and
Twentieth Century. Among the savages--all the savages--the average brain
is as competent as the