lowliest of His creatures, not even in that peace of mind which the
company of the humble is popularly supposed to afford, but rather with
the pangs and throes to which the poor human understanding is subjected
whenever it attempts to comprehend the meaning of life.




CHAPTER III

FILIAL RELATIONS


There are many people in every community who have not felt the "social
compunction," who do not share the effort toward a higher social
morality, who are even unable to sympathetically interpret it. Some of
these have been shielded from the inevitable and salutary failures which
the trial of new powers involve, because they are content to attain
standards of virtue demanded by an easy public opinion, and others of
them have exhausted their moral energy in attaining to the current
standard of individual and family righteousness.

Such people, who form the bulk of contented society, demand that the
radical, the reformer, shall be without stain or question in his
personal and family relations, and judge most harshly any deviation
from the established standards. There is a certain justice in this: it
expresses the inherent conservatism of the mass of men, that none of the
established virtues which have been so slowly and hardly acquired shall
be sacrificed for the sake of making problematic advance; that the
individual, in his attempt to develop and use the new and exalted