The frontier of the higher life is everywhere contiguous to the common life, and we can cross the border at any moment. The higher life is as real as the grosser things in which we put our trust. But our eyes must be anointed so that we may see it. The office of the religious teacher is to be a seer, and to make others see, and thus to win them into the upward way. They have not grasped the whole truth who see in the sympathetic side of human nature, in the tender and amiable impulses of the heart, the well-spring of our moral judgments. These gentle qualities--pity, tenderness, sympathy--are the sweet, younger sisters of Virtue; but Virtue herself is greater than they. We should seek to free the moral life from the embarrassments and entanglements in which it has been involved by the quibbles of the schools and the mutual antagonisms of the sects; to introduce into it an element of downrightness and practical earnestness; above all, to secure to the modern world, in its struggle with manifold evil, the boon of moral unity, despite intellectual diversity. In order to improve ethics as a science it is necessary to fix attention on the moral facts, to collect them, to bring them into view, especially the more recondite facts. Many of us stumble, not because we lack the desire to do what is right, but because we fail to discern what the right is. I believe in the supreme excellence of righteousness; I believe that the law of righteousness will triumph in the universe over all evil; I believe that in the attempt to fulfil the law of righteousness, however imperfect it must remain, are to be found the inspiration, the consolation, and the sanctification of human existence. We live in order to finish an, as yet, unfinished universe, unfinished so far as the human, that is, the highest part of it, is concerned. We live in order to develop the superior qualities of man which are, as yet, for the most part latent. The test of genuine moral culture is to be found in the attention we pay to the oft-neglected details of conduct; in the extent to which we have formed the habit of asking, What is it right to do in those little things which yet are not little? The thought of the brevity of life is the prod that spurs us on to the achievement of our task; it is like the blast of a bugle from the walls of a fortress that warns us to make haste lest the gates be closed against us.