It would be foolish to insist that goodwill alone will create conscience and that to detect the ethical core at the heart of man’s being is all that is required to make him ethical. It is a task to persuade human beings to trust their fellows; but is equally important to prompt their fellows to trustworthy action. If human nature is left unchallenged and undeveloped, it hardly qualifies the brute struggle for survival sufficiently to validate any religion or ethic of trust. Men’s actions are not as free as we have imagined. The social, economic and psychological sciences have restricted the concept of freedom in the soul of man as the physical sciences have restricted it in the universe. Man is not only less free than he had once imagined, but he is not as free as he once was. If science has discredited the idea of freedom, civilization has circumscribed the fact. It is easier for man to act as an ethical individual in a comparatively simple social group, such as the family, than in a very large and complex social group when even the most robust ethical purpose must meet the resistance and the corruption of the primitive and untamed desires of the group. If man is capable of sacrificing immediate advantages for ultimate ones and his own advantages for the sake of society, this capacity is an achievement which he gains only after much effort and preserves from corruption only at the price of eternal vigilance. The first requisite of an ethical life in modern civilization is a realization of the difficulties which face the human conscience in maintaining itself against the pressure of immediate desires to which the whole emotional life of man is wedded. It is not easy to sacrifice meat for beauty, pleasure for some seemingly ephemeral value, self-interest for the sake of the family, the interest of the family for the sake of society, the interest of our generation for the society of to-morrow. Yet only by such sacrifices can man prove the reality and potency of his creative will. If such sacrifices are not actually made, all so-called morality becomes in fact a device for obscuring the bestiality of man without overcoming it.