THE MORALITY OF HAPPINESS, 379 



every one of these systems includes — and professes to include — features 

 suitable to the special time and the special place when and where it 

 was propounded. How much of any system may thus be regarded as 

 local or temporary or both may be a moot point; but that some of 

 each system is of that sort is absolutely certain. "Because of the 

 hardness " of men's hearts the Mosaic system, for instance, had certain 

 rules ; and, because of the weakness of their hearts (who can doubt it ?), 

 the system which replaced that of Moses had certain other rules. The 

 same is true of every system of conduct ever propounded. We may 

 believe the rule sound and good in its own time and place, " Whoso- 

 ever shall smite you on the right cheek turn to him the other also," and 

 " If any man will sue thee at the law and take away thy coat, let him 

 have thy cloak also." A man may believe these rules to be more than 

 sound and good, to be of divine origin— yet recognize that in our 

 own time, and here, in Europe or America, the rules would work ill. 

 He who so taught recognized in the same way that other rules which 

 had been good in their time had lost their virtue with changing man- 

 ners. He knew ichere it is written, " Thou shalt give life for life, 

 eye for eye, tooth for tooth," and so on ; yet he only quoted these 

 Scripture teachings to correct them — " Bat I say unto you, that ye 

 resist not evil, but whosoever," etc. When he thus coiTected what 

 was " said by them of old time," he did not show disrespect — what- 

 ever the Scribes and Pharisees tried to make out — for the teachers of 

 old time, whose words he read and expounded. He knew that " old 

 times were changed," and therefore old manners and morals gone. 

 He said, " Suffer little children to come unto me," and loved them, not 

 teaching — as had seemed more convenient and was (let us believe) 

 better, in earlier days — that the child would be spoiled unless diligent- 

 ly belabored with the rod. 



These times and the races and the nations now most prominent on 

 the earth are even more unlike the community in Palestine nineteen 

 centuries ago, than that community was unlike the Jewish people in 

 the days of the more ancient lawgiver. The opponents of evolution 

 may prefer to believe that the human race has been stereotyped ; but 

 facts are a little against them. And even if we admitted the imag- 

 ined fixedness of the human race for nineteen centuries, they would 

 still have to explain the contradiction between two systems for both 

 of which they find the same authority. Of course, there is no real or 

 at least no necessary contradiction. Grant the human race to be 

 what we know it to be, a constantly developing family, and the con- 

 tradiction vanishes — we simply leam that what is best for one time is 

 not best for another, even among one and the same people; how much 

 more, then, must the best rules of conduct vary when different peoples 

 as well as different times are considered ! 



All this, however, is a disgression, which should have been unneces- 

 sary, but has in a sense been forced on me by the misapprehensions of 



