A single man, as we see him in one of the great modern civilizations, looks like a bit of machinery, a cog or a crank or an air-brake. The business man is especially mechanical, his functions are so accurate, so delimited and specialized. And yet any theory that dwells upon these limitations is put to shame in five minutes, for the creature eats and sheds tears before your eyes. All of the reasons for not doing some particular act that you think wise to be done, turn out to be founded on the idea that this man is a driving-wheel, and nothing but a driving-wheel. You cannot change him, they say, you must take him as he is. I have never heard any argument given against the wisdom of righteousness, except the existence of evil. “It exists, therefore subserve it.” Is it not clear that evil exists only because people subserve it? It has no fixity. Withdraw your support and it begins to perish. One man says, “Oh, let the world go. All the wickedness and unhappiness in it are inevitable.” Another says, “Some little concession to present conditions must be made.” Nothing can be said to justify the second man that is not moral support to the first. Your concession is always the acknowledgment of somebody’s weakness. Now you may make allowances for a man who has not come up to the mark; but if you make allowances for him beforehand, and assume that he is not going to do right, you corrupt him. If these things are true, then we are absolved from all complicity with vice. We need never take a course that requires to be explained. We thus get rid of a great oppression and can breathe freely. In the language of the old piety, Christian’s pack falls from his back. That pack has, in all ages, been a perversion of the conscience, a mistake as to the size of the universe.