It is no accident, now, that accompanying this double social conviction, there has come into theology a new insistence upon the principle of judgment of a man according to his light, and consequently also, what Professor Clarke calls "a tendency toward the recognition of greater reality and freedom in the other life, and thus toward the possibility of moral change."[76] Our conception of the future life was certain to be modified by the social consciousness; and it may be doubted if any influence of the social consciousness upon theology can be more clearly traced historically than this. The motives that have been working in our minds here include, on the one hand, a wholesome sense of the imperfection of even the best human lives; a glad discernment, on the other hand, of the presence of genuine ideals in lives where we had thought there were none; the certainty that, as Dr. Clarke says, "for at least one-third of mankind the entire life of conscious and developed personality is lived in the other world;"[77] an experienced unwillingness to say, where we cannot see, the precise point at which the very diverse lives of men under very diverse conditions come to full moral maturity; and the conviction that a life that is to be moral at all must be moral everywhere and through all time, and that where even we can see a little, God can see much more. All these motives, now, make us refuse, with Christ, to answer the question, "Are there few that be saved?" And both with increasing hope, and with that increasing sense of the seriousness and significance of life which so characterizes the social consciousness, to urge: "Strive to enter in." The growing sense of the likeness of men does affect our thought of the future life. The best men, under the clearest light, have only begun; for the best, there is still much need of growth. Who has not begun at all? For whom is there no growth? Let us make no mistake here. It is no light-hearted indifference to character, to which the genuine social consciousness leads. No age, indeed, ever saw so clearly as ours that the most essential conditions of happiness are in character, or was more certain that sin carries with it its own inevitable consequences. It is not a less, but a more, profound sense of the seriousness of the problem of moral character, that makes us hesitate to dogmatize concerning the future life.