By the fact that her public men recognised this ethical law Rome won
for herself in the ancient world spectacular grandeur. By an
unexampled national obedience to it glory has in our time accrued to
Japan. And, in truth, there is not anywhere any honour or renown but
such as comes from casting away the bonds of self and of the narrower
moralities to carry out the behests of the wider morality.

Even in the strongholds of transcendental religion where it was
axiomatic that morality began and was summed up in personal morality,
it is gradually coming to be recognised that, where we have two
competing moralities, it is always the wider morality which has the
prior claim upon our allegiance.

Kingsley's protest against the morality of "saving one's dirty soul"
marked a step in advance. And we find full recognition of the superior
claim of the larger morality in that other virile dictum of Bishop
Magee, "I would rather have England free, than England sober." That
is, "I would maintain the conditions which make for the highest
civilisation even at the price of a certain number of lapses in
personal and domestic morality."

What is here new, let it be noted, is only the acknowledgment by those
whose official allegiance is to a transcendental ideal of personal
morality that they are called upon to obey a higher allegiance. For
there has always existed, in the doctrine that guilty man could not be
pardoned and taken back into favour until the claims of eternal
justice had been satisfied, theoretical recognition of the principle
that one must conform to the precepts of abstract morality before one
may ethically indulge oneself in the lower moralities of philanthropy