by Walter Lippmann

There are, to be sure, certain residual and obsolete virtues which no longer correspond to anything in our own experience and now seem utterly arbitrary and capricious. But the cardinal virtues correspond to an experience so long and so nearly universal among men of our civilization, that when they are understood they are seen to contain a deposited wisdom of the race.

it is not accounted a virtue if a man eats when he is hungry or goes to bed when he is ill. He can be depended upon to take care of his immediate wants.

To transcend the ordinary impulses is, therefore, the common element in all virtue. Courage, for example, is the willingness to face situations from which it would be more or less natural to run away.

The moral commandments based upon divine authority were, in the nature of things, rather broad generalizations.

These typical solutions, such as we find in the Mosaic law or the code of Hammurabi, were no doubt the deposits of custom. They had, therefore, become perfected in practice, and were solidly based upon human experience. In the society in which they originated, there was nothing arbitrary or alien about them.

Yet with all its difficulties, it is to a morality of humanism that men must turn when the ancient order of things dissolves. When they find that they no longer believe seriously and deeply that they are governed from heaven, there is anarchy in their souls until by conscious effort they find ways of governing themselves.

When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.

the extreme complexity of rapidly changing human relations makes it very difficult to foresee all the consequences of any moral decision.

the teachers of humanism have no credentials. Their teaching is not certified. They have to prove their case by the test of mundane experience.

Insofar as men have now lost their belief in a heavenly king, they have to find some other ground for their moral choices than the revelation of his will.