of wisdom: why? Baldly stated, because Ulysses was the shrewdest and
most successful liar in classic antiquity. If Ulysses were to appear in
a society of decent men to-day, he would be excluded from their
companionship, and for the same reason that led Homer to glorify him as
the favorite pupil of the goddess of wisdom. Thus what is a virtue at
one stage of development becomes a vice as man climbs to higher
recognition of the moral order.

Just because the moral standard is relative, it is absolutely binding
where it applies. In other words, if you see the light shining on your
path, you owe obedience to the light; one who does not see it, does not
owe obedience in the same way. If you do not obey your light, your
punishment is that you lose the light--degenerate to a lower plane, and
it is the worst punishment imaginable.

Thus the same act may be for the undeveloped life, non-moral, for the
developed, distinctly immoral. Before the instincts of personal modesty
and purity were developed, careless sex-promiscuity meant something
entirely different from what a descent to it means in our society. When
a man of some primitive tribe went out and killed a man of another
tribe, the action was totally different morally from .the murder by a
man of one community of a citizen of a neighboring town to-day.

This gradual elevation of moral standards, or growth in the recognition
of the sacredness of life and the obligation to other individuals, can
be traced historically as a long and confused process. There was a
time, in the remote past, when no law was recognized except that of the
strong arm. The man who wanted anything, took it, if he was strong
enough, and others submitted to his superior force. Then follows an age
when the family is the supreme social unit. Each member of the family