We may be quite sure that far worse things come from these conditions on which we make our profit than are contained in the majority of those lives which, because of their irregularities or breaches of convention, we so swiftly rule off our calling lists. If we are not willing to forego the dividends produced for us out of our tolerated social conditions, why forego contact with that human material which they bring into being? But if you accept contact there, then you will have a difficulty in finding any human material of greater abasement to deny to it the advantage of your acquaintance.
I have purposely put my argument provocatively, and applied it to thorny and questionable subjects, because I want to reach no halfway conclusion in this matter, and because the real test of our spiritual toleration is now shifting from matters religious to matters social, from questions of doctrine to questions of daily life. To-day we must be prepared to tolerate a propaganda of social ideas—the products of which, if they succeeded in obtaining a hold, would in the estimation of many be as regrettable as were the products of Calvinism or Puritanism in the past, when they were much more powerful than now.
Our hatred of these new social ideas may be just as keen as the hatred of Catholicism for Protestantism or of Protestantism for Catholicism, in days when religious doctrine seemed to matter everything. More keen it could not be. The dangers these new ideas
