Nor can there be any doubt of the need of this emphasis in our own age. As men crowd more and more into the great centers of population, the tendency will be to hold men cheaply. In former times man was often highly valued because of his rarity. On the far Eastern plains a new face, not being often seen, was regarded with curious interest. Thus Abraham stood in the door of his tent in the heat of the day and welcomed the stranger, because the stranger was an event. But in the modern city the stranger is no longer an event; he is only an episode, or perhaps an incident. We pass him on the dense street, and we do not notice him at all. There are so many of him that, unless we are heedful, we shall come to regard him lightly just because he is hidden by the crowd. When factories grow so huge that men are known, not by their names, but by their numbers, only the scriptural emphasis upon men as such can save human beings from being deemed "hands" rather than souls. If the sin of the countryside is an excessive social interest that makes for gossip, the sin of the city is a social carelessness that makes for indifference. The various problems of our social life wait for their solution upon the Christian doctrine of man. When that doctrine has done its full service, race problems, labor problems, liquor problems, and all their dreadful accompaniments will issue into a righteous and intelligent peace. An immortal son of God, knowing himself, cannot be unjust to another immortal son of God, when once he knows his Brother. This hints at the personal bearing of the doctrine. As men grow in moral and spiritual experience, they find themselves using more and more the test of self-respect. Knowing that the reaction of certain behaviors makes them feel that a fragment of the soul has slipped away from them, so that they have the sense of smallness, they guard their natures lest legitimate pride should be destroyed. Andrews Norton once wrote to his son, Charles Eliot Norton, who was about to go abroad for an important service, telling the young man that his family and friends recognized that he had special powers for doing large and worthy things. Then he added that "this ought not to make one vain. On the contrary, their true tendency is to produce that deep sense of responsibility--of what we owe to God, to our friends, and to our fellowmen--which is wholly inconsistent with presumption or vanity." It was a wise father who wrote thus to his son. If the Christian doctrine of man be true, no man can think too much of himself. There is a type of saving pride. Clough stated it in his well-known lines: Then welcome, Pride! and I shall find In thee a power to lift the mind This low and groveling joy above-- 'Tis but the proud can truly love.