relic or survival in the maturer life of multitudes. of people. Duty at this stage is always characteristically negative in its form. It limits, restrains, and restricts. It confronts individual impulse with an authoritative authoritative command which says: "Thou shalt not." It is a stage of life which divides persons into two absolutely sundered classes -the sheep and the goats, i. e., those who say yes," and those who say no to the enjoined law of righteousness.

But however important this moral stage of life is, it is not yet the goal of ethical personal goodness. No person is good, in the highest and richest sense, until he chooses to perform his deed because he feels its inherent worth as an aim of life, and selects it because he knows that it is a good act to put a life into. It is thus self-chosen, no longer a thing of foreign compulsion, and yet the compulsion and the authority remain as real and as august as ever.

The slow and gradual heightening of the ethical life, as it passes over from external authority, to internal, from negation to affirmation, from fear to joy, is one of the most splendid stories of human life. Little by little one discovers, as he lives and sees deeper into the meaning of things, that a life of duty is a life of largeness and freedom.

There would be no richness, no content, to a life that answered no calls of duty, a life that remained shut up in its own self. The only way to fulfill one's life is to forget about it and become absorbed in something beyond it, to take up a task which thrusts itself in the way, and to do it. After each such deed the doer discovers that, without aiming for this result, he himself has been enlarged and enriched by it. He has been more than conqueror. He is now himself plus the deed he has done. In doing his duty he has found himself. In the path of duty and in the way of obligation lies the road to the true realization of life and of its meaning, and in this vision love casts out fear, and joy supplants dread.

But if duty is not now imposed as an external law and is not laid on us by a foreign will which we must obey or take the dread consequences, where does the call come from, and why is it so august, compelling and authoritative? What, in a word, makes duty duty and why do we follow its call as though we could not do otherwise?

The answer, as I see the matter, is this: A mature moral man's duty rests for him on a clear personal insight, or vision, of the course which fits his life. It will be of necessity an action for the sake of an ideal, for action along the line of

instinct, i. e., along a line of least resistance, would not be called duty. It will not be an action for the sake of pleasure, nor will it be taken in order to forward self-interest, for acts of that nature are acts which do not bear the brand and mark of obligation. All our obligations are born out of our relationship with others. The very word obligation means "tied-in " or "tied together." As soon as we realize what fellowship means we awake to duties and we discover that we cannot follow any easy primrose path that ends in self. Duty is always done for a larger whole than one's own me; it therefore always does come from beyond, and it seems, thus, even in its highest reaches, to be laid upon one from without.

We are for purposes of life, bound in, not only with those who now live and who form our visible society, but we are bound in as well with those who were before us and with those who will be after us. Our lives are never isolated, except in mental abstraction, but we are in living fact conjunct with a vast social environment which shapes all our action and from which we draw all our ideals.

We catch our visions of life in a very especial way from the persons who are our heroes and models, or the persons who have in some way won in our thought a prestige and for that reason get

from us unconscious and joyous imitation. Living in admiration, as we do, of Christ, and loving him as we must, if we see what he was and what he did for us, we cannot help coming into life-contact and relationship with him, and in some sense his ideals become ours and his outlook on the world and his desire for an altered humanity possess us and control us and unite us in one larger whole with him, till we believe in his belief and leap in some measure to his height of living.

When in this intimate and inner way he becomes our leader we are no longer our mere selves. We cannot live now for pleasure or for gain or for self. His will becomes in some degree our will, and we go his way- not because somebody or some book forbids us to do otherwise, but because love constrains us and a higher vision of an ideal world compels us. This attitude, which holds one fast as adamant to hard and difficult duty, is not irrational but, when life is conceived in its wholeness, is gloriously rational. It is an attitude, however, which often perhaps is not arrived at by clear and linked steps of reasoning.

But though not articulately reasoned out, insights of this moral type may be as rational as the clearest logic. No one probably ever comes

to a decision to sacrifice his life for a cause or for a truth by the mere persuasion of logic. The heroes who died at Thermopylæ could not have "explained" the grounds of their decision. They followed an insight which was born out of their relation to a country and they could not do otherwise. If instead of having Sparta for their loved cause they had been bound into life with the Founder of the Kingdom of God their whole attitude would have altered. They would have leaped to the sacrifice with the same eager joy, but it would now have been a sacrifice of self to preserve and guard the principle on which the kingdom exists and grows the principle of love, and that would be as rational as the other act actually

was.

Sacrifice of self is a feature of all rich and purposeful life. The moment a person cares intensely for ideals he has started on a way of life that makes great demands and yet it is also a way of great joy. Nobody who knows would ever prefer the way of ease and quick reward. The law of the survival of the fittest throws no light here. "The will to live," or " the will to power,' goes only a little way as an explanation of the processes of life. From somewhere a loyalty to