There is one virtue which we implicitly assume when we discuss philosophy, and usually invoke when we venture to discuss religion. It is the favorite "intellectual virtue" of our time: for, as the sophists disquietingly remarked in their day, and as Professor Sumner shows in _Folkways_, moral touchstones, like clothes, are subject to change of fashion; those of a former generation, taken for granted in all soberness, rise out of old books with a quaintness like that of the "y^e" and the long "s" of our forefathers. The "great, the awful, the respectable virtues," such as godliness and righteousness, as terms of approval, are seldom on our lips; the old stalwart, rigid qualities are less admired today than those which are more gracious and humane--than flexibility of mind, universal sympathy, open vision. But these latter in their turn we have now accepted as ideals, with no warning Socrates at our elbow to demand: "Precisely what do you mean by these new standards which you take for granted?" "Toleration is so prodigious an impiety," said a member of the Westminster Assembly, "that this religious parliament cannot but abhor the meaning of it." Yet, in that constant gradual "transvaluation of all values" which humanity performs, tolerance has become the golden word of modern thought. And, like all popular ideas, it is unthinkingly accepted and facilely claimed. Even those who admit that they have not attained full measure of it, hide themselves behind the remark: "I am tolerant of everything except intolerance," and thereby yield them altogether: for to be tolerant only of a corresponding tolerance, is like confining your courtesy to polite people. The only attitude which tests the quality of tolerance is precisely the intolerant attitude. But passing by these simple folk, we may yet find in the more serious-minded the sense of an inconsistency in the very conception, which puts it forever beyond our reach. We may be undertaking the difficult experiment of eating our cake and having it too. Yet even so there may be a refuge: for if paradox should prove to be the final form of truth--a union of opposites present in all living facts--inconsistency will have no devastating effect on it. The very fabric of truth may be woven of just such contradictions; reality may _never_ be consistent. But whether or no this be the way out, there are plainly difficulties to be considered, if we are to understand, and at the same time accept, the ideal of tolerance.