XV

INCENTIVES FROM SOCIAL LOYALTY

RE

ELIGION is loyalty to God. Conscientiousness is loyalty to one's self. Religion and conscience combine in demanding of every man loyalty to one's fellow men. Jesus wore this triple crown of virtues: loyalty to His Father-"I do always those things that please Him"; loyalty to the dignity of His own perfect character-"Who of you convicteth me of sin?" and loyalty to everybody-giving Himself for the world.

Social Loyalty is thus a supreme excellence, an exquisite blossom of human character; but it is also a common virtue rooted in the ordinary instincts of manhood. The sentiment is essential to the existence of civilization. Savagery is only fullest self-assertion, individualism unrestrained. In that base condition men seize whatever passion craves or want suggests. There is no civil order among them except under the club of the strongest. As the dawn of intelligence spreads men see themselves in their relation to others; or, if they do not fully

reason about social necessities, they feel, perhaps instinctively at first, their mutual relations. Possibly at the beginning they are like bees-each bee, burrowing into the wax, pressing on all sides with feelers, legs, and wings to make full space for her own comfort, is met by the similar pressure of other bees on all sides. The result is, from mechanical necessity, a hexagonal cell for each, and a beautiful harmony for the common hive. So men scarcely developed out of animalism create for themselves a marvelous degree of social order, in which a multitude of antagonisms produce mutual safety and well-being.

Trade and commerce have a similar genesis in the sentiment of Social Loyalty; as Live, and let live" grows into the finer maxim, " Live and help live." All relief projects, hospitals, asylums, schools; all liberal professions, of medicine, religion, science, and even that of arms in the defense of the State, spring from the same generous incentive. The finality of human well-being is in Christ's kingdom, whose laws are such as these, "Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others"; "Let each esteem other better than themselves."

That man who does not live from the sentiments of Social Loyalty not only demits the highest, but ignores the lowest virtue. Such

men there are, chiefly of three classes, to be suppressed resolutely if society is to endure: the anarchist with his pistol, hunting for rulers; the selfish debauchee, who silently infects society with his own rot: and the ambitious man, who is in business or politics only for what he can get out of it.

Consider that Social Loyalty is not only essential to the common welfare, but is also the strongest aid to individual usefulness. A single coal in the grate can scarcely be ignited, and soon dies out, while many coals lying close together, with only chemical breathing room between them, by giving out their heat to one another make the fire intense and lasting until the inflammable store in each is exhausted. There are in every community men and women of great ability who, as social factors, amount to so little that they are not felt while they live and will be little missed when they die. They take no part in what others are doing because in their conceited opinion it might be more wisely done. Or the common enterprise of their neighborhood, their church, their party, is not up to their self-righteous notion of what it ought to be. These are the cynics. The careers of such persons are quite uniform: like the solitary coal in the grate they flash and splutter, just enough to show the gas that is in them, then die out. They think themselves

better than others, while in fact they are worse, devoid of this essential quality of nobleness, the sentiment of loyalty to their fellows.

Nature everywhere everywhere illustrates well-being through community of interest. The strongest force we know of is that of mutual attraction. The stars are bound together into harmonious order, each maintaining its perfect orbit because it feels the drawing of all the stars in the system. Except a few elements, there is no existing substance which is not made by the chemical affinities of its own components. So in the vegetable world, the earth yields freely whatever may nourish each of the myriad roots that are planted in it: the root contributes to trunk and branch and leaf whatever they demand, and in turn leaf and flower and fruit gather from the atmosphere what they give back to replenish the vitality of stock and root. Thus Nature is the perfection of reciprocity. What Scripture says of men, Nature demands throughout her whole realm, namely, that no thing shall live to itself or die to itself.

Observe, too, that the higher the forces the more carefully they are operated to avoid antagonisms. Lower forces seem at times to war their way to power. The stream tears out its channel. A storm overcomes the inertia of things in its path and hurls them aside or along. Yet this seeming contention, on closer observa