We should acquire the habit of taking stock from time to time of our moral possessions, of keeping faithful count of our net gains and losses. Do we, for instance, possess more fortitude, or less, in encountering unavoidable pain? Are we in better or worse control of our passions, of our tempers? Alas, that many of us, as we grow older, become more fretful and irascible, a greater trial and burden to our surroundings. Are we more broadly charitable in our judgment of others; more ready to make allowance for their faults, to bear with their shortcomings? Are we more or are we less devoted to the public ends of humanity? Does our idealism turn out to have been a mere ebullition of optimistic youth, a mere flash in the pan? Or does it grow wiser and warmer with the years? Does it burn with a steadier glow? Are we learning resignation, renunciation? It is by an honest answer given to such questions as these that we may decide whether we are progressing or retrograding.
When we have reached a certain stage of culture, genuine gratitude and the verbal expression of it are inconsistent. We can say thanks for the little gifts, the lesser favours. But when the gift is great, and the debt exceeding heavy, when we are full to overflowing with gratitude, then the words die upon our lips, and the only way to show our gratitude is by the use we make of the benefits we receive. For this reason, among others, the verbal expression of thanks to the Infinite Being in the form of prayer has always seemed to me a kind of desecration.
Because the Hebrew view of life is essentially the ethical view, therefore we still go back to the writings in which this view was first promulgated, and delight in them, as we do in no other scriptures in the world.
All of us are spiritually the heirs of the Hebrew prophets, including among them Jesus, the greatest of their number.
There are moral traits in all religions, but, as a rule, they are subordinated. Morality is subordinated to beauty and harmony in the Greek ideal. It is the accompaniment and consequence of order in the Confucian scheme. It is but one form of the brightness of things, as opposed to darkness and evil, in Zoroastrianism. But to the Hebrew thought, moral excellence is the supreme excellence to which every other species of excellence is tributary.