Is loyalty, then, something about which there is nothing to be learned? Is there no counterfeit and caricature of loyalty? No mask behind which men hide their indolence and complacency and thoughtlessness? You meet a man whom you have not seen in long years, and you say to him: "Why, you have not changed a bit, you are precisely the same as in the old days." Have you praised him, necessarily? If he left you as a child, looking and speaking and thinking and acting like a child, ought he not to have changed? Does a fruit remain what it was as bud and blossom? Life is development--but development is a constant _self-changing_. Development is an incessant _dis_-loyalty to what is already there. And if man, just because he is man, and has a will of his own and can set himself against the law of development, should sell his life to the force of inertia--would not that be a crime against life? And yet, even such a deed men call loyalty! Men say that they want to be faithful to the heritage of the fathers. Which is often enough simply to say that they mean to store away their heritage where it will be kept from the world's light and air that would destroy it--but where, also, it can enter into no human intercourse, serve no life, fulfil no end of life. This loyalty of unchangeableness to the heritage puts the talent in a napkin, and there can be no increase. Men say that they mean to abide faithful to their faith unto death. Often enough this is only stubbornness and narrowness. It requires no art and no merit to exercise such faithfulness. All one needs to do is to close one's eyes and ears to what lies beyond the bounds of this faith, to forego the questionings and uncertainties that others must pass through,--and then to send in one's claim to the reward and gratitude due such loyalty! Today it is quite the thing at college commencements to spy out the men who are models of such loyalty and to say: "Look how firm and steadfast and rock-like they are!" But it cannot be denied that much of this illustrious loyalty is nothing but natural or voluntary incapacity to think more widely than others have taught them to think, or, for the matter of that, permitted them to think. Back of this bragging about principles which are vainly declared to be unshakable, there is frequently nothing but an ill-natured obstinacy whose so-called principles have no other basis than the self-interest to which they are contributary. It was this loyalty to the finished,--finished cult, finished belief, finished customs and practices, finished religion and morality,--that stoned the prophets and crucified Jesus. It was this kind of loyalty that the mediaeval church imposed upon the "Faithful," imprisoning the conscience therein for time and for eternity. Bound by an oath of loyalty, the priest renounced the world; the monk and nun under monastic vows dedicated their lives to the church, their services to "heaven." And hence it marked an epoch when Luther called their