oeth into a man but
that which cometh out of him. That applies to all education--especially
moral education. So that if you argue from what has gone into the human
race in the way of moral teaching you may be greatly surprised and
perhaps disappointed when you compare it with what has come out of the
human race in the meantime. What has been taught is not what has been
learnt. It has suffered a sea change in the process. Nor is the question
wholly one of learning. There is the further question of remembering. I
believe that a candid examination of the facts would convince us that
the human race has proved itself a forgetful pupil. It has not always
retained what it has learnt. Emerson has said that no account of the
Holy Ghost has been lost. But how did Emerson find that out? The only
accents Emerson knew of were those which the world happened to have
remembered. If any had been lost in the meantime Emerson naturally would
not know of their existence. I have heard of a functionary, whose
precise office I am not able to define, called 'the Lord's
Remembrancer'. It would be a great help to Moral Progress if we had in
modern life a People's Remembrancer. His place is occupied to some
extent by the study of history, and for that reason one could wish for
the sake of Moral Progress that the study of history were universal. For
my own part I seldom open a book of history without recovering what for
me is a lost account of the Holy Ghost. Next to conceit I reckon
forgetfulness as the greatest enemy of Moral Progress. I suppose Rudyard
Kipling had something of this in mind when he wrote his poem--

Lord God of Hosts be with us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget.

Another cause of our over-estimate of Moral Progress is that we have
thought too much of the abstract State and too little of the actual
States now in being. Our devotion to 'the' State as an ideal has led us
to overlook the fact that many actual States represent a form of
morality so low that it is doubtful if it can be called morality at all.
In their relations _with one another_ they display qualities which would
disgrace the brutes. And the worst of it is that at times these States
drag down to their own low level the morality of the individuals
belonging to them. Thus at the present moment we see quite decent
Englishmen and quite decent Germans tearing one another to pieces like
mad dogs, a thing they would never dream of doing as between man and
man, a