long tolerate this one.  To think that this world is all, leans toward madness; such a picture of man is a travesty, not a portrait of his nature.  Only on some such basic truths as these can we build character in our young people.  Paganism tells them that it is neither natural nor possible to keep themselves unspotted from the world.  Over against it we must reiterate, You can and you must! for the man that sinneth wrongeth his own soul.  You are something more than physical hunger and reproductive instinct; you are of spirit no less than dust.  How, then, can you do this great sin against God!

How abundant here are the data with which religious preaching may deal.  Indeed, as Huxley and scores of others have pointed out, it is only the religious view of man that builds up civilization.  A great community is the record of man’s supernaturalism, his uniqueness.  It is built on the “higher-than-self” principle which is involved in the moral sense itself.  And this higher-than-self is not just a collective naturalism, a social consciousness, as Durkheim and Overstreet and Miss Harrison would say.  The simplest introspective act will prove that.  For a man cannot ignore self-condemnation as if it were only a natural difficulty, nor disparage it as though it were merely humanly imposed.  We think it comes from that which is above and without, because it speaks to the solitary and the unique, not the social and the common part of us.  Hence conscience is not chiefly a tribal product, for it is what separates us from the group and in our isolation unites us with something other than the group.  “Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned and done this evil in Thy sight.”  So religious preaching perpetually holds us up above our natural selves and the natural order.

Thus man must live by an other-than-natural law if he is to preserve the family, which is the social unit of civilization.  Its very existence depends upon modifying and transforming natural hunger by a diviner instinct, by making voluntary repressions, willing sacrifices of the lower to the higher, the subordinating of the law of self and might to the law of sacrifice and love—­this is what preserves family life.  Animals indeed rear and cherish their young and for the mating season remain true to one another, but no animality per se ever yet built a home.  There must be a more-than-natural law in the state.  Our national life and honor rest upon the stability of the democracy and we can only maintain that by walking a very straight and narrow path.  For the peace of freedom as distinguished from precarious license is a more-than-natural attainment, born of self-repression and social discipline, the voluntary relinquishment of lesser rights for higher rights, of personal privileges for the sake of the common good.  Government by the broad and easy path, following the lines of least resistance, like the natural order, saying might is right, means either tyranny or anarchy. Circumspice!  One of