What is the common assay for moral gold? The test of the motive. Sir Gorgio Midas has given £100,000 to found a Midas hospital. What says the man in the street? "Ah! fine advertisement for the Midas pills!" Mr. Queech, the grocer and churchwarden, has given £5 to the new Methodist Sunday School. "H'm!" says the cynical average man, "a sprat to catch a mackerel." Sir Norman Conquest, Bart, M.P., has made an eloquent speech in favour of old-age pensions. Chigwin, the incorruptible, remarks with a sniff that "it looks as if there would soon be a General Election."

What do these gibes mean? They mean that the benevolence of Messrs. Midas, Queech, and Conquest is inspired by selfishness, and therefore is not worthy, but base.

Now, when a gang of colliers go down a burning pit to save life, or when a sailor jumps overboard in a storm to save a drowning fireman, or when a Russian countess goes to Siberia for trying to free the Russian serfs, there is no sneer heard. Chigwin's fierce eye lights up, the man in the street nods approvingly, and the average man in the railway compartment observes sententiously:

"That's pluck."

Well. Is it not clear that these acts are approved and held good? And is it not clear that they are held to be good because they are felt to be unselfish?

Now, I make bold to say that in no case shall we find a man or woman honoured or praised by men when his conduct is believed to be selfish. It is always selfishness that men scorn. It is always self-sacrifice or unselfish service they admire. This shows us that deep in the universal heart the root idea of morality is social service. This is not a divine truth: it is a human truth.

Selfishness has come to be called "bad" because it injures the many without benefiting the one. Unselfishness has come to be called "good" because it brings benefit and pleasure to one and all. "It is twice bless'd: it blesseth him that gives and him that takes." As Marcus Aurelius expresses it: "That which is not for the interest of the whole swarm is not for the interest of a single bee." And again he puts it: "Mankind are under one common law; and if so they must be fellow-citizens, and belong to the same body politic. From whence it will follow that the whole world is but one commonwealth."

And Epictetus, the Greek slave, said that as "God is the father of all men, then all men are brothers."

For countless ages this notion of human brotherhood, and of the evil of self-love, has been to morality what the sap is to the tree. And now let us think once more how the notion first came into being.

I said that morality—which is the knowledge of good and evil—did not come by revelation from God, but by means of evolution. And I said that this idea was first put forth by Spencer and Darwin, and afterwards dealt with by other writers.