Widespread
public opinion is a force of incalculable power, which is largely
unused. Politics and business, and to a far greater extent than now
private life, will become clean and honest and kind just so soon as
a sufficient number of people wake up and demand it. We have the power
to make sins which are now generally tolerated and respectable, so
odious, so infamous, that they will practically disappear. There are
certain of the older forms of sin which the race in its long struggle
upward has so effectually blacklisted that only a few perverts now
lapse into them; we have execrated out of existence whole classes of
cruelty and vice. But with the changing and ever more complex relations
of society new forms of sin continually creep in; these we have not
yet come to brand with the odium they deserve. Leaders of society and
pillars of the church are often, and usually without disturbance of
conscience, guilty of wrongdoing as grave in its effects, or graver,
than many of the faults we relentlessly chastise. On the other hand,
many really useful reforms are blocked because they awaken old prejudices
or cross silly and meaningless conventions. The air is full of proposals,
invectives, causes, movements; how shall we know which to espouse and
which to reject, or where best to lend a hand? We need a consistent
and well-founded point of view from which to judge. To get such a sane
and far-sighted moral perspective; to see the acts of our fellow men
with a proper valuation; to be able to point out the insidious dangers
of conduct which is not yet as generally rebuked as it ought to be;
and at the same time to emancipate ourselves and others from the mistaken
and merely arbitrary precepts that are intermingled with our genuine
morality, and so attain the largest possible freedom of action, such
should be the outcome of a thorough study of ethical principles and
ideals.
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