results; has appealed
variously to the spiritual imagination with legend and story. The
fresh blood of the Northern peoples has come in to reenforce the spent
and struggling morality of the South. A romantic conception of love
has blended nature's two great forces--sense and spirit--instead of
setting them in opposition, and has invested wedlock with its true
sanctity, in place of the false exaltation of celibacy. And, under
various influences, the relation of the sexes has upon the whole been
so far heightened that we see this at the end of two thousand
years,--that marriage, which Paul himself looked upon as a kind of
necessary evil, is recognized as the best guardian and teacher of
purity.

The connection between the two most strongly marked phases of Christian
morality--between love and purity--is not an arbitrary or accidental
one. It is an ideal affection that best masters the sensuous nature.
In the words of "Ecce Homo," "No heart is pure that is not passionate;
no virtue is safe that is not enthusiastic."

The modern attitude has two broad differences from early Christianity.
Man addresses all his energy to understanding and controlling the
forces of nature, instead of regarding them as alien or hostile and his
own salvation as a matter of supernatural relation.

And his relation with the Infinite and the Hereafter is far more
various, subtle, intimate.

Epictetus gives the heaven of the conscience, Jesus of the heart,
Emerson of the intellect.

Man's problems now are to find the physical and the social heaven,--to
rightly correlate the spirit with the body and the earth, and to more
perfectly organize society.

The modern man, instead of appealing to Jehovah or Christ, grasps the
powers of nature and of life as they are put into his own hands.
Walter Scott writes in his journal, in a sharp exigency: "God help--no,
God _bless_--man must _help_ himself."

"Love God and man; what higher rule can there be?" we are asked. But
the actual work of the modern man is widely different from what Jesus
or Paul perceived. To understand natural forces and ally himself with
them; to rightly order that vastly complex organism, the state; to
frankly enjoy the pleasures of the healthy body; to discern the beauty
of the surrounding world; to reproduce beauty in art; to relish the
humor of the world,--these are aims which would have sounded strange to
Paul, to Jesus, or to Epictetus.

To seek the best, n