Editorial note — LESSON VIII.

[Footnote A: See Seventy's Year Book No. II, Part II, Lesson IX, p. 50. On this distinction between mere innocence and virtue, Professor Joseph Le Conte of the University of California says: "It will, I think, be admitted by all that innocence and virtue are two very different things. Innocence is a pre-established, virtue a self-established, harmony of spiritual activities. The course of human development, whether individual or racial, is from innocence through more or less discord and conflict to virtue. And virtue completed, regarded as a condition, is holiness, as an activity, it is spiritual freedom. Not happiness nor innocence but virtue is the goal of humanity. Happiness will surely come in the train of virtue, but if we seek primarily happiness we miss both. Two things must be borne steadily in mind; virtue is the goal of humanity; virtue can not be given, it must be self-acquired. * * * Why could not man have been made a perfectly pure, innocent, happy being, unplagued by evil and incapable of sin? I answer: The thing is impossible even to Omnipotence, because it is a contradiction in terms. Such a being would also be incapable of virtue, would not be a moral being at all, would not in fact be man. We can not even conceive of a moral being without freedom to choose. We can not even conceive of virtue without successful conflict with solicitations to debasement. But these solicitations are so strong and so often overcome us, that we are prone to regard the solicitations themselves as essential evil, instead of our weak surrender to them." (Evolution and Its Relation to Religious Thought—1902—pp. 372-3.)]