itions to sacrifice the body, but you may be obliged to
sacrifice his intellectual development. In order that he may be the
best up here, he must put the others sometimes, relatively, under his
feet. So, again, that which would be right on the physical plane or the
intellectual plane becomes relatively wrong, if it interferes with that
which is higher still.

And so, if you recognize man as a spiritual being, a child of God, then
you say it is right, if need be, to put all these other things under
his feet, in order that he may attain the highest and best that he is
capable of here. But you see it is life all the way, it is the physical
life or it is the mental life or it is the affectional life or it is
the spiritual life; and that which is necessary for the cultivation and
development of these different grades of life becomes on those grades
right, and that which threatens or injures one or either of these
grades becomes, so far as that grade is concerned, wrong.

Life, then, continuance, fullness, joy, use, this is the standard of
right and wrong; a standard which no book ever set up, which no book
can ever overthrow; a standard which is inherent, natural, necessary, a
part of the very nature of things.

I wish now for a moment I must of course do it briefly to consider the
relation of religion to this natural morality. And perhaps you will
hardly be ready some of you, at any rate for the statement which I
propose to make, that sometimes, in order to be grandly moral, a man
must be irreligious. I mean, of course, from the point of view of the
conventional religion of his time, he must be ready to be regarded as
irreligious. In the earliest development of the religious and moral
life of a tribe, very likely, the two went hand in hand, side by side;
for the dead chief now worshipped as god would be looked upon as in
favor of those customs or practices which the tribe had come to regard
as right. But religion perhaps you will know by this time, if you have
thought of it carefully is the most conservative thing in the world.
Naturally, it is the last thing that people are willing to change. This
reluctance grows out of their reverence, grows out of their worshipful
nature, grows out of their fear that they may be wrong.

But now let me illustrate what I mean. Religion, standing still in this
way, has become an institution, a set of beliefs, of rites and
ceremonies, which do not change. The moral experience of the peop