It is often said that this distrust is merely an aspect of the normal rebellion of youth. I do not believe it. This distrust is due to a much more fundamental cause. It is due not to a rebellion against authority but to an unbelief in it. This unbelief is the result of that dissolution of the ancient order out of which modern civilization is emerging, and unless we understand the radical character of this unbelief we shall never understand the moral confusion of this age. We shall fail to see that morals taught with authority are pervaded with a sense of unreality because the sense of authority is no longer real. Men will not feel that wisdom is authentic if they are asked to believe that it derives from something which does not seem authentic. We may be quite certain, therefore, that we shall not succeed in making the traditional morality convincingly authentic to modern men. The whole tendency of the age is to make it seem less and less authentic. The effort to impose it, nevertheless, merely deepens the confusion by converting the discussion of morals from an examination of experience into a dispute over its metaphysical sanctions. The consequence of this dispute is to drive men, especially the most sensitive and courageous, further away from insight into virtue and deeper and deeper into mere negation and rebellion. What they are actually rebelling against is the theocratic system in which they do not believe. But because that system appears to them to claim a vested interest in morality they empty out the baby with the [p229] bath, and lose all sense of the inwardness of deposited wisdom. For that reason the recovery of moral insight depends upon disentangling virtue from its traditional sanctions and the metaphysical framework which has hitherto supported it. It will be said, I know, that this would rob virtue of its popular prestige. My answer is that in those communities which are deeply under modern influences the loss of belief in these very traditional sanctions and this very metaphysical framework has robbed virtue of its relevance. I should readily grant that for communities and for individuals which are outside the orbit of modernity, it is neither necessary nor desirable to disentangle morality from its ancient associations. It is also impossible to do so, for when the ancestral order is genuinely alive, there is no problem of unbelief. But where the problem exists, when the ancient premises of morality have faded into mere verbal acknowledgments, then these ancient premises obscure vision. They have ceased to be the sanctions of virtue and have become obstructions to moral insight. Only by deliberately thinking their way past these obstructions can modern men recover that innocence of the eye, that fresh, authentic sense of the good in human relations on which a living morality depends.