A second remark concerns the perplexed subject of the conflict of duties. The nearer duties are sometimes preferred to the more remote, and at other times we are asked to sacrifice everything to the larger whole. We owe our first devotion, it is said, to the members of our family; but then again we must be willing to sacrifice life itself and the welfare of our family to our country when it calls upon us in its need. Largeness alone certainly does not serve as an ethical ground for preference. The quantitative standard implied in such phrases as “the greatest good of the greatest number” is out of place when we deal with ethical relations, which in their very nature are qualitative. Now the account of the social institutions given in previous chapters as successive stations on the road to the spiritual goal may throw some light on this difficult subject. Normally, the claims of the anterior stations are to be preferred—the claims of the family for instance to those of the vocation, because the family is the matrix of the three-fold reverence, and the individual must pass under the ethical influence of family life before he is fit to use vocational life ethically to good purpose. The anterior groups are not merely smaller, they are germinal. The training received in them is the condition on which spiritual progress depends later on. On the other hand, the later groups are the more complete and more explicated expressions of the spiritual ideal; hence if the very existence of one of the later groups is threatened, or is in danger of being denatured of its spiritual use, then the later group is to be preferred to the earlier, the _terminus ad quem_, precisely because it is the _terminus ad quem_, to the _terminus a quo_. To give a familiar illustration. In our time, which is a time of transition and doubt, many a religious teacher finds himself in sore straits to decide between the claims of the vocation and the family. As a religious teacher he is pledged to teach only what in his heart of hearts he believes to be true; he is especially under obligation to use words in such a way as to convey to others the same meaning that he attaches to them himself. But this may mean exposing his family to serious privations. The situation is full of perplexity and pain, but the line of choice is plain enough. The claims of his high vocation must in this case take precedence. In like manner, when the existence or the integrity of the state is at issue, the claims of the state as the _terminus ad quem_ override those of the vocation, the family, and the state, and may even demand the sacrifice of the physical existence of the individual himself. NOTES