Hence the peculiar service of the self-disciplined individuals who openly reverse themselves with evident happiness. We know how the young are helped to be self-critical and at the same time self-confident when a parent or a teacher makes amends for his errors, either intellectual or administrative. The late Josiah Strong told with utter simplicity how he, a Christian minister, discovered that his preaching had misconstrued the Gospel, and how through self-reversal he experienced a kind of joyful conversion (see My Religion in Everyday Life). Harry Emerson Fosdick has experienced, we may be sure, a sense of happy emancipation as he has publicly abandoned positions that he publicly took during the War. The revivalist, Gypsy Smith, having repeated in public a story that was damaging and offensive to the then Mayor Hylan, “took it all back” in public without qualification or self-excuse. One can safely guess that a few more acts like these on the part of preachers and evangelists would recommend religion more effectively than rivers of argument, denunciation, and pleading. Is it Quixotic to hope for an ultimate reversal of the popular assumption that of course every individual and organization will be on the defensive with respect to what he or it is and is doing? May not this defensive attitude at last be seen to be what it verily is, weakness rather than strength? May not repentance become the expected thing, acquiring the dignity and the educational force that belong to any necessary aspect of our rationality? The growth of cooperative thinking is one sign that this hope is not entirely without ground. Even “rights” and “vital interests” will be safer when this day comes than they are now. Demonstrate that you are unarmed, and others will lay down their arms; then you can “talk it over.” Where wrong has been done, an unreserved acknowledgment of it has time and again smitten the hardness of men’s spirits, and streams of generosity have burst forth. Often and often what we most need is someone who will take the initiative in repentance. The diagnosis of humanity’s sickness that was made in Part III indicated that the affected part is our intelligence, and that recovery depends upon sharpening our wits. It should now be evident that sharpening our wits is different from putting an edge upon a tool that is no part of ourselves. Our “wits” are not constituted of any impersonal intelligence, but of intelligence that quivers through and through with personality and the laws of its growth. Intellect, as such, cannot whittle itself to a point, as we see in the practical stupidities of intellectual men; the total attitude of the person towards himself and towards others is involved.