hich we are loyal, each of us is
but a mass of caprices, a chaos of distracting passions, a longing for
happiness that is never fulfilled, a seeking for success which never
attains its goal. Meanwhile, no merely customary morality ever
adequately guides our lives. Mere social authority never meets our
needs. But a cause, some unity of many lives in one, some call upon the
individual to give himself over to the service of an idealized
community--this gives sense to life. This, when we feel its presence, as
we do upon this occasion, we love, as the lovers love the common life of
friendship that is to make them one, or as the mothers delight in the
life that is to unite themselves and their children in the family, or as
the devout feel that through their communion in the life of their church
they become one with the Divine Spirit. For such a cause we can make
sacrifices, such as the soldier makes in following the flag. For what is
the fortune of any detached self as compared with the one cause of the
whole country? And just such a voluntary devotion to a cause can ennoble
the routine of the humblest daily business, in the office, in the
household, in the school, at the desk, or in the market place, if one
only finds the cause that can hold his devotion--be this cause his
business firm or his profession or his household or his country or his
church, or all these at once. For all these causes have their value in
this: that through the business firm, or the household, or the
profession, or the spiritual community, the lives of many human selves
are woven into one, so that our fortunes and interests are no longer
conceived as detached and private, but as a giving of ourselves in order
that the social group to which we are devoted should live its own united
life.

With this bare indication of what I mean by loyalty, I may now say that
of late years I have attempted to show in detail, in various discussions
of our topic, that the spirit of loyalty, rightly understood, and
practically applied, furnishes an adequate solution for all the
problems of the moral life. The whole moral law can be summed up in the
two commandments: first, Be loyal; and secondly, So choose, so serve,
and so unify the life causes to which you yourself are loyal that,
through your choice, through your service, through your example, and
through your dealings with all men, you may, as far as in you lies, help
other people to be loyal to their own causes; may