And when there shall be applied to love the solemn saying “the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away” we may learn to temper our loss by the intenser gratitude for whatever, even if only for a time, has been ours. As with fidelity in love, so also with “loyalty” to persons, even to causes and ideas. But such, too often degrading, loyalty will, I imagine, be more than compensated for by the condemnation of a new sin against the Holy Ghost, and by insistence on a minimum (at least!) of consistency in one’s own ideas and a minimum of conformity between one’s judgment of others and one’s judgment of oneself: the mote in one’s brother’s eye awakening the suspicion of the beam in one’s own. At the same time (which is not our time!), and as Intelligence takes on a leading part in morals, there will come the indulgent recognition that such a “decency” as we may exact (or try to exact) from ourselves, cannot, any more than personal cleanliness in our own day, be exacted from all our neighbours. It may take a good many transformations of Proteus before the mote can always be removed from our brother’s eye, even supposing the beam to have been taken away from our own. It is no easy matter to be always clean inside and out, especially when, like the little boy in Stevenson’s rhyme, “your dear Papa is poor,” poor in spirit, perchance one of a long line of moral paupers. Neither is “decency” always attainable where there has been no past charwoman to prepare your easy tidiness at expense of previous dirty hands. Still less when, as nowadays, wallowing in excess or in cruelty is the only excitement many people can get out of life. Hence it may be a long while yet before the bare decencies of the spirit, even if recognized for such, can lose the value of rarity and the status of virtues. For, let us remember that, the fouler mankind’s surroundings and sores, the greater the need for incense and myrrh and even for the questionable odour of sanctity. Is not early Christianity’s, say St. Paul’s, insistence on chastity and mansuetude the expression of the otherwise inexpressible bestiality, cruelty, and vaingloriousness of decadent Rome? And what is the foolish Franciscan laudation of beggary save the measure of mediæval rapine and simony?