And yet, when we look at all the common and traditional ordering of daily life, whether in our educating of the young or in the influences that we allow to prevail among young and old, it would seem sometimes as if this thought of the soul's sensitiveness had never dawned upon us. When we once really grasp this thought, or, let us rather say, when this thought has once really fastened upon our mind, and fixed itself there, so that it remains with us, and goes about with us; and when, in consequence, we come to feel how easily any soul may be perverted, or rendered hard or dull; in one word, how easily it may be degraded; then it follows that we look with new eyes on many things, many customs, many influences which the unthinking hardly notice, or notice only to misjudge. In the light of this feeling of the soul's sensitiveness, the thoughtful man is very often intolerant of things which to others seem of little moment, because he sees how they are tending to dull or deaden the eye of the soul, or to pervert or to kill its finer instincts; and how, in consequence, though tradition may have given them a sort of spurious consecration, or the world in its blindness may have come to honour them, they are in fact laden with mischief to the general life. It was the thought of this sensitiveness of the soul to external influences, and of the ease with which any bad influence, or bad custom or practice or fashion, perverts common lives, and of the untold mischief which is consequently latent in it, that winged the words of a well-known writer when she protested, some years ago, against what she designated as debasing the moral currency. That writer was thinking primarily of vulgar jesting on great subjects, which should stir us to admiration and reverence, and so debasing men's tastes. She had in her mind the class of persons who have the art of spoiling things that are noble or beautiful by their vulgar handling of them; and of the mischief which is done by such persons to public taste and tone and character. But we may widen the reference. Whosoever, in anything that concerns the conduct of life, spreads low notions, or drags down men's opinion or taste, thus helping to pervert ordinary minds from those higher aims and motives and those reverent views of character and life which should be cherished for our common use and service, is debasing the moral currency.