ill make good: and thus,
and thus only, shall we bring to light, in part at least, the precious
things in his nature, the existence of which we can only divine. The
moral law is wholly misunderstood if it be founded on the actual
worth or value of men, for none of us has great worth or value.
The moral law is a law for the eliciting of possibilities. Briefly put,
it enjoins that we shall invest others with a garment of light, that
we shall ascribe worth to others and to ourselves, in order that
they and we may become worthy. This is the spiritual basis of the
doctrine of equality; this is the spiritual conception which should
regulate our attitude toward our neighbors.

And yet if there were no evidence at all to support our faith in
human goodness, our faith, however vigorous at first, would soon
decline, and hope and courage might utterly desert us. If men on
nearer acquaintance turned out to be, as some pessimists have
represented them to be, hard egotists, ingrates, slanderers,
backbiters, envious, incapable of generous admirations, sodden in
sensuality, knaves devoid of scruple; if experience indeed bore out
this sweeping impeachment, if especially the so-called masses of
mankind were hopelessly delivered over to the sway of brutal
instincts, of superstition and folly; the faith of which I speak might
justly be termed mere fatuousness, and the rule of acting on the
assumption that men are better than they appear would turn out a
blind delusion. But the striking fact is, that as soon as we act on
the principle of looking for the latent good in others, we are
rewarded by finding far more than we had any reason to expect.

Take as an instance the masses of the poor and ignorant, upon
whom we are so apt to pass sweeping judgments, as Carlyle did
when he said that the population of England was forty millions--
mostly fools. The experience of those who have had to do with
popular education does not corroborate this rash condemnation.
There is hardly a child in our public schools that is not found to
possess mental power of some sort, if only we possess the right
method of calling it out. The new education is new and significant
just because it has succeeded in devising methods for gaining
access to the latent mental power, and thus reaching what had
been supposed to be non-existent. Every so-called educational
campaign in the field of politics brings out the same truth. The
capacity for hard thinking and sound judgmen