But I am not simply body. So this principle must be modified. Come up to the fact that I am an intellectual being. In order to develop myself intellectually, I may have to forego things that would be pleasant on the bodily plane. I sacrifice the lower for the higher; and that which would be right on the physical plane becomes relatively wrong now, because it interferes with something that is higher and more important. Rise one step to man as an affectional being. If you wish to develop him to the finest and highest here, you may not only be obliged under certain conditions to sacrifice the body, but you may be obliged to sacrifice his intellectual development. In order that he may be the best up here, he must put the others sometimes, relatively, under his feet. So, again, that which would be right on the physical plane or the intellectual plane becomes relatively wrong, if it interferes with that which is higher still. And so, if you recognize man as a spiritual being, a child of God, then you say it is right, if need be, to put all these other things under his feet, in order that he may attain the highest and best that he is capable of here. But you see it is life all the way, it is the physical life or it is the mental life or it is the affectional life or it is the spiritual life; and that which is necessary for the cultivation and development of these different grades of life becomes on those grades right, and that which threatens or injures one or either of these grades becomes, so far as that grade is concerned, wrong. Life, then, continuance, fullness, joy, use, this is the standard of right and wrong; a standard which no book ever set up, which no book can ever overthrow; a standard which is inherent, natural, necessary, a part of the very nature of things. I wish now for a moment I must of course do it briefly to consider the relation of religion to this natural morality. And perhaps you will hardly be ready some of you, at any rate for the statement which I propose to make, that sometimes, in order to be grandly moral, a man must be irreligious. I mean, of course, from the point of view of the conventional religion of his time, he must be ready to be regarded as irreligious. In the earliest development of the religious and moral life of a tribe, very likely, the two went hand in hand, side by side; for the dead chief now worshipped as god would be looked upon as in favor of those customs or practices which the tribe had come to regard as right. But religion perhaps you will know by this time, if you have thought of it carefully is the most conservative thing in the world. Naturally, it is the last thing that people are willing to change. This reluctance grows out of their reverence, grows out of their worshipful nature, grows out of their fear that they may be wrong.