Man always attempts to rationalize any position he assumes, and to give high-sounding motives to what may in reality stem from the basest. Because we choose to make making money our main preoccupation, we call it service. Because we choose to put off the day when the nation shall turn to other things, we say “America is young.” Because we choose to yield to the seduction of every new toy and luxury, we claim that we are establishing a “high standard of living.” Because we cannot resist giving ourselves everything, we say that we devote ourselves to our mad rush for money in order that we may give our children everything, regardless of the fact that by raising their standard of income and needs, and lowering their standard of life, we are in reality making their future infinitely more difficult for them.[Pg 69] The ethics of the older generation have dissolved in part from the hypocrisy that has been bred in it by this desire for money and what it will bring in luxury and social consideration. The dissolution is evident not only in our having become a nation of speculators who are forever trying to get something for nothing, not merely in the defalcations and greater or lesser crimes committed by the weaker, but in that more subtle crime against our higher natures, and against the new generation, the crime of cloaking our weakness and material desires in the guise of a “high standard” and of “giving our children everything.” Let us consider further a few of the ideas which are familiar to the younger generation and which to a great extent were not so to the youth of the older one. For one thing, we may cite the comparative study of religion. There are only two methods of intellectual approach to any subject, whether religious or scientific. We may rely upon authority—that is, someone else’s judgment—or upon our own. From the time that Protestantism rejected the authority of the Catholic Church and insisted upon the right of personal searching and interpretation of the Scriptures the way was opened for the decline in the prestige of authority. (I may say that I am not a Catholic.) Of course particular sects could establish new creeds and try to set up new authority in the place of old; and because man is not wholly a logical creature, and because most men still believed in the verbal inspiration of the Bible however they chose to interpret it, this served to maintain its authority until almost the present day. With the rise, however, of the higher criticism, and more particularly the study of comparative religion, the religious sanction for ethics received a severe blow. For one young person who[Pg 70] bothers to read a textual criticism of any Biblical book, numbers are familiar with and delight in Frazer’s Golden Bough. Nothing serves more subtly to break down a belief in the theology of Christianity than to find, for example, that the idea of a dying god is common to many religions and many