ety of
religion and morals both, is yet quite willing, and without a qualm of
conscience, on the slightest hint of a suspicion, to tear into tatters
the character of one of her neighbors or friends, does not hesitate to
slander, perhaps is unjust or cruel to the servants that make the house
comfortable and beautiful for her; in other words, transgressing the
real laws of right and wrong, she is shocked and troubled over the
transgression on the part of others of some purely conventional
statute, the keeping or breach of which has no real bearing on the
welfare of the world.

A good many of our social judgments are like the case of the old lady
pardon me, if it should make you smile, but it illustrates the case who
criticised with a great deal of severity a neighbor and friend who wore
feathers on her bonnet. Somebody said to her, But the ribbons on your
bonnet are quite as expensive as the feathers that you criticise. "Yes,"
she said, "I know they are; but you have got to draw the line
somewhere, and I choose to draw it at feathers." So you find a great
many people on every hand in society who are choosing to draw these
lines purely artificial, purely conventional in regard to matters of
supposed right or wrong, while they are not as careful to look down
deeply into the essential principles of that which is inherently right
or wrong.

And now at the end I wish to suggest what is a theme large enough for a
sermon by itself, and say that these laws of righteousness are so
inherent that they are self-executed; and by no possibility did any
soul from the beginning of the world ever escape the adequate result of
his wrong-doing. The old Hebrews, as manifested in the Book of Job, the
Psalms, and all through the Old Testament, taught the idea, which was
common at that time in the world, that the favor of God was to be
judged by the external prosperity of men and women. The Old Testament
promises long life and wealth and all sorts of good things to the
people who do right; and I find on every hand in the modern world
people who have inherited this way of looking at things. I have heard
people say: I have tried to do right, and I am not prosperous. I wonder
why I am treated so? I have heard women say, I have tried to be a good
mother: why is my child taken away from me? As though there was any
sort of relation between the two facts. I hear people say, Don't talk
to me about the justice of God, when here is a man, who has been