would you have the stumbling and unanchored do with what has been
thrust upon him?"

"Man, in his gropings down through the centuries, has concocted,
shivered, and patched certain social conditions well enough calculated
to develop the best and the worst that is in us, making it easier for
us to be bad than good, that good might be the standard. We feel a
deeper satisfaction if we have conquered an evil impulse and done
what is accepted as right, because we have groaned and stumbled in
the doing,--that is all. Temptation is sweet only because the impulse
comes from the depths of our being, not because it is difficult to be
tempted. If we overcome, the satisfaction is deep and enduring,--which
only goes to show that man is but a petty egotist, always drawing
pictures of himself on a pedestal. The man who emancipates himself
from traditions and yields to his impulses is debarred from happiness
by the blunders of the blindfolded generations preceding him, which
arranged that to yield was easy and to resist difficult. Had they
reversed the conditions and conclusions, the majority of the human
race would have fought each other to death, but the selected remnant
would have had a better time of it.

"Let us suppose a case as conditions now exist. Assume, for the sake
of argument, that you loved me and that you plucked from your nature
your religion, your fidelity to your house, your love for your
brother, and gave yourself to me. You would stand appalled at the
sacrifice until you realized that you had come to me only because
it would have been more difficult to stay away. You conquer the
passionate cry of love,--the strongest the human compound has ever
voiced,--and you are miserably happy for the rest of your life no
attitude being so pleasing to the soul as the attitude of martyrdom.