Now this result has, as we all know, serious social consequences. Even the least stable society must be organised on some firm framework of custom, rule, and law; and these, in their turn, must find their main support in the willing loyalty of the general community. But, though loyalty is the great essential, it is not sufficient. Legislators, lawyers, moralists, all agree that in the collision between ends—especially between egoistic and altruistic ends—it is not always the highest end as judged by the agent himself, still less the highest end as measured by the standards of the community, which finally prevails. Therefore must law and custom have the support of sanctions: sanctions being nothing else than devices for bringing a lower motive to the aid of a higher, and so producing better conduct, if not[8] better morals. Public approval and disapproval, the jailer and the hangman, heaven and hell, are familiar examples. Can they in any true sense effect a reconciliation between discordant ends, and, in particular, between altruism and egoism? I hardly think so. When they are effective they doubtless diminish ethical conflict; but it is by ignoring the intrinsic value of one set of ethical ends. In so far as we are honest because honesty is the best policy, in so far as we do not injure lest we should ourselves be injured, in so far as we benefit that we may be benefited ourselves—just in that proportion we treat altruistic actions merely as the means of attaining egoistic ends. The two competitors are not reconciled, but a working arrangement is reached under which the conduct appropriate to the higher ideal is pursued from motives characteristic of the lower. Is any truer reconciliation possible? Scarcely, as I think, without religion. I do not suggest that _any_ religious theory gets rid of ethical anomalies, or theoretically lightens by a feather-weight the heavy problem of evil. But I do suggest that in the love of God by the individual soul, the collision of ends _for that soul_ loses all its harshness, and harmony is produced by raising, not lowering, the ethical ideal.