It is also a fact that where you find one or two virtues singled out for observance and the rest obscured there you find, too, throngs of outwardly "moral" people with corroded hearts. Villages, churches, and all the quieter communities are notorious for this, the peculiarity having formed for a hundred and fifty years the stock-in-trade of novelists. Sobriety and continence being more or less in evidence the assumption is that all the requirements have been fulfilled. The community is "moral" notwithstanding the back-bitings, heart-burnings, slanders, cheatings, envies, hatreds, and bitternesses that may permeate it through and through. As I write, the cramped, venomous, unlovely life of the American small town is the favourite theme of our authors and readers of fiction. Since a number of the works now on the market have met with national approval one must assume that the pictures they paint are accurate. The conditions are appalling, but, according to the custom of the country, they are "moral." The shadow of insobriety and incontinence doesn't touch the characters who move across these pages, and yet the level of the life is pictured as debased, and habits as hideous. XVII With morals in this accepted American sense righteousness has little to do. The two are different in origin. Morals imply the compulsion of men, and are never more binding than the customs of men render them. They are thus imposed from without, while righteousness springs from within. The essence of righteousness lies in the turning of the individual toward God.