But there is one point of difference between the pulpit and the platform, between the exposition of religion and politics, which I have never been able to understand. After all, in both cases, you are dealing with and making your appeal to human nature; you may be inciting it to virtue, you may be exposing its imperfections and its faults. Why is it, then, that in the religious appeal “conversion”--change of heart--stands for almost everything, whilst on the political platform it is hardly reckoned with? It is so much easier and safer to tell a congregation that they are “miserable sinners,” and even to get them (perhaps conventionally) to say it of themselves, than to tell it, or to extract a like confession from a political audience. In a church we allow ourselves to be taken to task for “hardness of heart and contempt of God’s word and commandments”; at a political meeting it is only our opponents whom we so take to task, while of ourselves and our party we have nothing but praise. It is on these lines that a general election is run--revivalist meetings are held throughout the country to denounce, not our own sins, but the sins of others. Is it any wonder that it does not produce honest results? Having said this, I have given the main standpoint of the papers that follow. I do not believe that we can get home to our political and social problems without self-accusation going quite as deep as anything we say of ourselves in church or chapel--or without making the application very direct and personal. There is no institution in our midst, religious or secular, which does not stand quite as much in need of conversion, change of heart, as do the individuals for whose benefit or disciplinary treatment it is run. Our schools, prisons, law courts, State institutions, ministries, diplomacies--all those things on which we most pride ourselves--are just as liable, perhaps more liable, to hardness of heart and contempt of God’s word and commandments as we ourselves, for they are all part of us. It is, indeed, one of our social devices to get rid of our consciences by making them institutional. There is a certain class of mind which thinks that if it has established legality it has established a right over conscience--that if it has established order it has established virtue. It has very often established quite the contrary--not virtue but a State-regulation of vice; for if we can turn the hardness of our hearts into a State-regulation, there we have vice enthroned; and the callousness of the individual is enlarged and becomes a national callousness, all the more difficult to get rid of, because it has become identified with law and authority.