od, but asks for more of the same thing, more
respect for personality, more reverence for womanhood, more stability for
the home, more truthfulness, more peacefulness, more love. Thus he
combined continuity with progress, conservatism with radicalism.

II

The platform for ethical progress laid down in the Sermon on the Mount is
a great platform. When Tolstoi first realized the social significance of
these simple sentences, it acted as a revelation which changed his life.
Even men who reject the supernatural claims of Christianity uncover before
the Sermon on the Mount. Yet its fate is tragic. It has not been "damned
with faint praise," but made ineffective by universal praise. Its
commandments are lifted so high that nobody feels under obligations to act
on them. Only small sections of the Christian Church have taken the
sayings on oaths, non-resistance, and love of enemies to mean what they
say and to be obligatory. Yet all feel that the line of ethical and social
advance must lie in the direction traced by Jesus, and if society could
only climb out of the present pit of predatory selfishness and meanness to
that level, it would be heaven.

Do you and I believe in it? Do we believe that it is not enough to keep
out of the spiritual hell and damnation of adultery, but that a clean mind
would be the most efficient and cheerful mind? Do we believe that a man
who forgives and keeps sweet is happier and safer than a man who always
resents things and stirs the witches' caldron of hate in his soul? If a
man loved his enemy and turned the other cheek, would he be everybody's
door-mat or everybody's temple of refuge?

Suppose we mark for the present those parts which we are willing to accept
as our own standards of action. If there are portions which do not seem
practicable, let us post them in our minds as debatable propositions, as
points to be tested by the experience of coming years, or as working
hypotheses in the science of living.

But whatever we may think of single points, let us stick to the leading
thought of Jesus, that every advance toward the Kingdom of God, that is,
toward the true social order, involves a raising of the ethical standards
accepted by society. This is a principle of social progress which every
leading intellect ought to know by heart.

III

When Jesus offered his six sample cases of ethical progress, he had no
intention of exhausting the principle of advance which he laid down. The