A Period of Turmoil and Change

Abstract

The central or fundamental philosophical truth which underlies the mental and moral culture which the age requires is the truth of the moral order of the universe. Human life belongs to an actual order, a cosmos, not a chaos; and this order is a moral order, and tends to and prefers truth, justice, and righteousness. The opposite error, which has misled a large portion of American society, is the opinion that the moral order to which man’s life belongs is subjective only; that nothing belongs is true or right in itself, but only as it seems so to us; that there is no real standard of human conduct; only a conventional one; and that if men would generally agree to it the relations and nature of right and wrong might be reversed. This is what is really fatal in unbelief in our times, not the rejection of the creed of my church or yours, but the loss of the perception and assurance of the truth that the laws of nature and the inevitable working of the forces of the universe are hostile to falsehood and injustice.¹