You will find, if you look over the face of
society, that there are two kinds of morality, frequently quite
inconsistent with each other; and sometimes the poorer of the two kinds
is held in higher esteem than the better. I mean there is conventional
morality, and there is real morality.
As a hint of illustration: An American woman goes to Turkey to-day; and
she is shocked by the customs of the women and their style of dress. It
seems to her that no woman can possibly be moral who, although she
covers her head, can appear on the street with feet and ankles bare.
But this same Turkish woman is shocked beyond the possibility of
utterance to know that in Europe and America women carefully cover
their feet, but expose their faces and their shoulders. It seems
terrible to her, and she cannot understand how a European or American
woman can have any regard for the principles of delicacy and morality.
Do you not see how, in both cases here, it is purely a matter of
convention? No real question of morality is touched in either case. I
speak of this to prepare you to note how conscience can be as troubled
over things which are purely conventional as it can over things which
are downright and real. Let me use another illustration, going a little
deeper in the matter. Here is a man, for example, who is terribly
shocked because his neighbor takes a drive with his family on Sunday
afternoon. It seems to him an outrage on all the principles of public
and social morality; and he is eager to get up a society to abolish
such customs, that seem to him to threaten the prosperity of all that
is good in the world.
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