endless
variety in the details, your loyalty has for its object each time, not
merely a group of detached personalities, but some ideally significant
common life; an union of many in one; a community which also has the
value of a person, and which, nevertheless, cannot be found distributed
about in a collection of fragments found inside the detached lives of
the individual members of the family, the club, the class, the college,
the country, the church. If this common life to which you are loyal is a
reality, then the real human world does not consist of separate
creatures alone, of the mere persons who flock in the streets and who
live in the different houses. The human world, if the loyal are right,
contains personality that is not merely shut up within the skin, now of
this, now of that, human creature. It contains personalities that no
organism confines within its bounds; that no single life, that no crowd
of detached lives, comprises. Yet this higher sort of common
personality, if the loyal are right, is as real as we separate creatures
are real. It is no abstraction. It lives. It loves, and we love it. We
enter into it. It is ours, and we belong to it. It works through us, the
fellow servants of the common cause. Yet we get our worth through
it,--the goal of our whole moral endeavor.

For those who are not merely loyal, but also enlightened, loyalty, never
losing the definiteness and the concreteness of its devotion to some
near and directly fascinating cause, sees itself to be in actual
spiritual unity with the common cause of all the loyal, whoever they
are. The great cause for all the loyal is in reality the cause of the
spread and the furtherance of the cause of the universal loyalty of all
mankind: a cause which nobody can serve except by choosing his own
nearer and more appreciated cause--the private cause which is directly
his own--his family, his community, his friendship, his calling, and the
calling of those who serve with him. Yet such personal service--your
special life cause, your task, your vocation--is your way of furthering
the ends of universal humanity. And if you are enlightened, you know
this fact. Through your loyalty you, then, know yourself to be kin to
all the loyal. You hereupon conceive the loyal as one brotherhood, one
invisible church for which and in which you live. The spirit dwells in
this invisible church,--the holy spirit that wills the unity of all in
fidelity and in service. Hidd