THE SALT OF THE EARTH
(1918)
IT is a curious commentary upon the confusion of tongues which has descended upon us in our efforts to build towers reaching to Heaven, that you would have been misled had I given this address its true title. Had I called it "the Value of Purity" most of you would have imagined that I was going to speak of what is usually called—with such strange one-sidedness—the "social evil"; just as we call the liquor traffic "the Trade." You would have thought, probably, that I was going to speak about Regulation 40 D, or some other aspect of the sex problem with which the word "purity" has become conventionally allied. It would, indeed, be one-sided in the other direction, to exclude such considerations from the scope of so embracing a theme; but my intention is rather to disencumber the word "purity" from the narrow and puritanical meaning to which it has become limited; and the "Salt of the Earth" does bring us nearer by its salutary implication to what purity should really mean.
For if purity is not a good sanitary principle of fundamental application to all ethical problems alike, it is merely a pious fad which may easily become a pious fraud—a religious tenet pigeon-holed by crabbed age for the affliction
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