loyalty a sin, and went forth into the world, the home, the vocation, the business, breaking the vows of priest and cloister. Was such disloyalty to a sacred obligation loyalty in the sixteenth century, and shall it be blasphemy in the twentieth? Is it not rather a blasphemy to preach to men a loyalty which obligates them to forego the use of their best and noblest powers, which condemns them to spiritual standstill in the eternal progressive movement of life? Take some illustrations which will test insight and courage. There is the constitution of the United States. Shall we assume toward it the loyalty of fixedness and finality, or the loyalty of change? No man of veneration and equipoise would favor capricious or precipitate or superfluous change in so noble a document. But, for all that, the experience of life made the constitution for life's sake, and the maker is more than the made. If our national life pass--as pass it has--into new seas and under new stars, where life needs a change of the constitution, then the principle which prompted the people to frame the constitution in the first place requires them to change it to meet the new needs of our growing and changing national life. The superficial loyalty to the changeless letter must yield to the profound loyalty to the ever-changing spirit. The constitution is for the sake of the people, not the people for the sake of the constitution. They, rather than it, are sacred. Similarly, there is the modern problem of marriage, the family, and the home. Shall ours be the old loyalty that holds the customs of the past inviolable, marriage indissoluble, the inherited patterns of home and family unchangeable--the loyalty of fixedness and finishedness; or shall it be the loyalty of change in all these matters to meet the changing needs and situations of our burdened and bewildered modernity? Again, no man of sanctity and sanity and stability of soul can favor any arbitrary radicalism that is subversive of time-honored institutions _for no better reason_ than a fleeting fancy, or the passing of the romance of the honeymoon, or raw self-will, or an unanticipated burden or hardship. But, for all that, the marriage institution, like all others, is for the sake of man and not man for the sake of the institution. It was _life_ that originated our domestic ideas and customs and conventions and codes; and if ever life, in the interest of its well-being and progress, requires changes suited to new needs and new days, then the "new loyalty" to life that ever changes must replace the old loyalty to codes that never change. Codes, too, are for the sake of life, not life for the sake of codes. No loyalty to the letter that means disloyalty to the spirit.