So far, the moral corruption of the twentieth century has not produced the flagrancy of conduct that characterised a good many earlier ages. “My _ideas_ of life have become so rotten,” thus a Pragmatised and Behaviourised youngster confessed to me, “that I wonder my _life_ is not rottener.” He looked startled when I told him to give his ideas time. However, it appeared that, partly in spite of and partly by means of his marked self-consciousness, he had attained to some veracity of inward unhappiness. We may hope that his case is quite typical. In other words, our self-conscious modern age has provided a wide and unprecedented demonstration of the fact that the chief danger to human happiness is immorality of _ideas_. Previous ages have done lip-homage to high moral standards while grossly violating them in practice. The modern age has proudly assumed that it has grown far beyond such hypocrisy. Meanwhile it has developed the subtler hypocrisy of cultivating depraved and specious ideas while shrinking from the _full_ consequences of them in conduct. The result is that life looks dully undramatic, culture and art degenerate, and thoughtful persons who are harmless enough in their acts have a real misery in their spirit. Surely, therefore, we have now a chance to learn afresh the _inward_ relentlessness of the Moral Laws; particularly that “precious gift” which we have so bitterly corrupted, the law of humility. We may now perceive that the universal proverb “Pride goes before a fall” is no less applicable to our age than to the old aristocratic ages; and that, far from being merely a maxim of external prudence, it is the folk-sign of an _inward_ region of cause and effect that we, with all our self-consciousness, have scarcely penetrated. We may find again the inward and yet superhuman rigour of the Laws. We may learn that they are supernatural without being ever _un_natural; always immanent in us and yet, in a mystery beyond the reach of our science, always transcendent of us. Browning’s Paracelsus, embodying the modern mixture of romance and science, complained in regard to his own catastrophe that “God’s intimations fail in clearness rather than in force.” Precisely so; but there is no use in whining about it. The human task is to clarify and obey, as well as we can, Laws which we did not invent; which no man, except when stupified by pride--either his own pride or the pride of his teachers, relentlessly visited upon him to the third and fourth generation--can conceive to be merely human inventions.