Our mature life is not radically distinguished from childhood as regards the working of personal influence upon our moral thought. If there is progress it is in the way of fulness of experience and better organization: the mental life may become richer in those sympathetic or imaginative impulses which we derive from healthy intercourse with the world, and without a good store of which our judgments of right must be narrow and distorted; there may at the same time be a completer ordering and discipline of these materials, a greater power to construct the right, the unifying thought, out of diverse elements, a quicker recognition of it when achieved, and a steadier disposition to act upon it. In most cases, perhaps, a person after thirty years of age gains something in the promptness and steadfastness of his moral judgment, and loses something in the imaginative breadth of his premises. But the process remains the same, and our view of right is still a sort of microcosm of our whole character. Whatever characteristic passions we have will in some way be represented in it, and until we stiffen into mental rigidity and decline, it will change more or less with every important change in our social surroundings. To a very large class of minds, perhaps to the largest class, the notion of right presents itself chiefly as a matter of personal authority. That is, what we feel we ought to do is simply what we imagine our guide or master would do, or would wish us to do. This, for instance, is the idea very largely inculcated and practised by the Christian Church. It is not anything opposed to or different from the right as a mental synthesis, but simply means that admiration, reverence, or some other strong sentiment, gives such overwhelming force to the suggestions of a certain example, that they more or less completely dominate the mind. The authority works through conscience and not outside of it. Moreover the relation is not so one-sided as it would seem, since our guide is always, in one point of view, the creation of our own imaginations, which are sure to interpret him in a manner congenial to our native tendency. Thus the Christ of Fra Angelico is one thing, and the Christ of Michelangelo, directing the ruin of the damned, is quite another.