ons and the massacring of Armenians,
express much rather that aboriginal human neophobia, that pugnacity of
which we all share the vestiges, and that inborn hatred of the alien
and of eccentric and non-conforming men as aliens, than they express
the positive piety of the various perpetrators. Piety is the mask, the
inner force is tribal instinct. You believe as little as I do, in
spite of the Christian unction with which the German emperor addressed
his troops upon their way to China, that the conduct which he
suggested, and in which other Christian armies went beyond them, had
anything whatever to do with the interior religious life of those
concerned in the performance.

Well, no more for past atrocities than for this atrocity should we make
piety responsible. At most we may blame piety for not availing to
check our natural passions, and sometimes for supplying them with
hypocritical pretexts. But hypocrisy also imposes obligations, and with
the pretext usually couples some restriction; and when the passion gust
is over, the piety may bring a reaction of repentance which the
irreligious natural man would not have shown.

For many of the historic aberrations which have been laid to her
charge, religion as such, then, is not to blame. Yet of the charge
that over-zealousness or fanaticism is one of her liabilities we cannot
wholly acquit her, so I will next make a remark upon that point. But I
will preface it by a preliminary remark which connects itself with much
that follows.

Our survey of the phenomena of saintliness has unquestionably produced
in your minds an impression of extravagance. Is it necessary, some of
you have asked, as one example after another came before us, to be
quite so fantastically good as that? We who have no vocation for the
extremer ranges of sanctity will surely be let off at the last day if
our humility, asceticism, and devoutness prove of a less convulsive
sort. This practically amounts to saying that much that it is
legitimate to admire in this field need nevertheless not be imitated,
and that religious phenomena, like all other human phenomena, are
subject to the law of the golden mean. Political reformers accomplish
their successive tasks in the history of nations by being blind for the
time to other causes. Great schools of art work out the effects which
it is their mission to reveal, at the cost of a one-sidedness for which
other schools must make amends. We accept a John H