m is not the only nor the primary upward
force. Before it and along with it goes the individual's struggle for
his own betterment,--the outreach, first, of hunger and sex; then
toward finer forms of pleasure; then of moral aspiration. Democracy,
socialism are an effort for _common_ betterment; the egoistic merges
with the altruistic impulse.

The mind must be held open to the free winds of knowledge. If they can
shake the foundations, let them. And just as one's personal courage
must often tremble before personal risks, so there must sometimes be
intellectual tremors.

If in the ardent temper and sweet spirit of the New Testament we try to
discriminate as to what phases of human conduct receive the chief
stress, we find the strongest emphasis is on brotherly love and
chastity. The ethical service of the Christian church has been
greatest in the direction of these two qualities. What it has done for
purity is beyond our power to measure. And it is just at that point
that even yet the struggle of humanity to emerge from the bestial
condition seems most difficult and doubtful. Some writer has remarked
that Christianity apparently introduced no really new virtue into human
society, with the exception of male chastity. Shakspere in one sonnet
gives tremendous expression to the evil of lust, with this conclusion:--

"This all the world doth know; yet none know well
To shun the heaven, that leadeth to this hell."

Christianity, in a way of its own, opened a gate out of that hell. The
gate was the power of a pure spiritual affection. Paul describes, in
language that strikes home to-day, the war of flesh and spirit. For
him, its conclusion is: "O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver
me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our
Lord!" At the crisis there rises in his spirit the consciousness,
vivid as a personal presence, of that great, pure, loving soul; and
temptation falls dead. Augustine relates more fully a like experience.
The turning-point of his life comes when, still bound after long
struggles by a sinful tie, there comes to him the message, "Put ye on
the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh to fulfill
the lusts thereof." The church has not confined itself to a single
form of influence. It has invested the command to purity with the
sanction of a divine behest; has used threats and penalties; has
employed asceticism, often with most disastrous