I suppose that three hundred years ago all people who thought at all about moral questions, about questions of Right and Wrong, deduced their rules of conduct absolutely and unreservedly from the past, from some dogmatic injunction, some finally settled decree. The great mass of people do so to-day. It is written, they say. "Thou shalt not steal," for example--that is the sole, complete, sufficient reason why you should not steal, and even to-day there is a strong aversion to admit that there is any relation between the actual consequences of acts and the imperatives of right and wrong. Our lives are to reap the fruits of determinate things, and it is still a fundamental presumption of the established morality that one must do right though the heavens fall. But there are people coming into this world who would refuse to call it Right if it brought the heavens about our heads, however authoritative its sources and sanctions, and this new disposition is, I believe, a growing one. I suppose in all ages people in a timid, hesitating, guilty way have tempered the austerity of a dogmatic moral code by small infractions to secure obviously kindly ends, but it was, I am told, the Jesuits who first deliberately sought to qualify the moral interpretation of acts by a consideration of their results. To-day there are few people who have not more or less clearly discovered the future as a more or less important factor in moral considerations. To-day there is a certain small proportion of people who frankly regard morality as a means to an end, as an overriding of immediate and personal considerations out of regard to something to be attained in the future, and who break away altogether from the idea of a code dogmatically established forever.