In the harlequinade of fabulous material success the nations of “modern civilization” suffered a moral deterioration, in themselves and in their individual members; by a moral regeneration they may be saved.  How is this to be accomplished?  How, humanly speaking, is the redemption of society to be achieved?  Not alone by change of heart in each individual, though if this could be it would be enough.  Humanly speaking there is not time and we dare not hope for the divine miracle whereby “in the twinkling of an eye we shall all be changed.”  Still less by sole reliance on some series of new political, social, economic and educational devices; there is no plan, however wise and profound, that can work effectively under the dead weight of a society that is made up of individuals whose moral sense is defective.  Either of these two methods, put into operation by itself, will fail.  Acting together they may succeed.

I repeat what I have said before.  The material thing and the spiritual force work by inter-action and cooerdinately.  The abandonment or reform of some device that has proved evil or inadequate, and the substitution of something better, changes to that extent the environment of the individual and so enables him more perfectly to develop his inherent possibilities in character and capacity, while every advance in this direction reacts on the machinery of life and makes its improvement more possible.  With a real sense of my own personal presumption, but with an equally real sense of the responsibility that rests on every man at the present crisis, I shall venture certain suggestions as to possible changes that may well be effected in the material forms of contemporary society as well as in its methods of thought, in order that the spiritual energies of the individual may be raised to a higher level through the amelioration of a hampering environment, and, with even greater diffidence, others that may bear more directly on the character-development of the individual.  In following out this line of thought I shall, in the remaining seven lectures, speak successively on:  A Working Philosophy; The Social Organism; The Industrial and Economic Problem; The Political Organization of Society; The Function of Education and Art; The Problem of Organic Religion; and Personal Responsibility.

I am only too conscious of the fact that the division of my subject under these categorical heads, and the necessities of special argument, if not indeed of special pleading, have forced me to such particular stress on each subject as may very likely give an impression of undue emphasis.  If each lecture were to be taken by itself, such an impression would, I fear, be unescapable; I ask therefore for the courtesy of a suspension of judgment until the series is completed, for it is only when taken as a whole, one paper reacting upon and modifying another, that whatever merit the course possesses can be made apparent.

II