But at the same time, through meditation on the civilized state, the perception must become common property that all merely external measures for raising and making healthy the modern state, however effective they may be in themselves, will have only a quite imperfect result unless the spirit of the state becomes quite different. Let us, then, undertake to drive the modern state, so far as the power of our thought reaches, into the spirituality and the morality of the civilized state as it is to be, by following the ideas contained in reverence for life. We demand from it that it shall become more spiritual and more ethical than any state has hitherto been called on to become. Only with efforts to reach the true ideal do we get progress. The objection is raised that, according to all experience, the state cannot exist by relying merely on truth, justice, and ethical considerations, but has in the last resort to take refuge in opportunism. We smile at this experience. It is refuted by the dreary results it has produced. We have, therefore, the right to declare the opposite course to be true wisdom, and to say that true power for the state as for the individual is to be found in spirituality and the ethical. The state lives by the confidence of those who belong to it; it lives by the confidence felt in it by other [pg 284] states. Opportunist policy may have temporary successes to record, but in the long run it assuredly lands itself in failure. Thus ethical world- and life-affirmation lays upon the modern state the requirement that it shall aspire to making itself an ethical personality. It presses this obstinately upon the state, and does not let itself be deterred by the smiles of superior persons. The wisdom of to-morrow has a different tone from that of yesterday. Only by a new spirit and temper ruling within it can the state attain to peace within its borders; only by a new spirit and temper arising between them can different states come to understand each other, and cease to bring destruction upon each other; only by treating the overseas world in a different spirit and temper from that of the past and of to-day, can the modern state cease to load itself in that quarter with guilt. Such moral talk about the civilized state has often been produced in the past. Certainly it has. But it acquires a special tone at a time when the modern state is perishing in misery, because it refused in the past to continue to be in any way spiritually ethical. It possesses a new authority, too, to-day because in the world- and life-view of reverence for life there is revealed the significance of the ethical in its full extent and its full profundity.