The Waterbury Democrat., 1944-01-27
Gst GexIzQ H3
 REAL PERSON BY DR. HARRY EMERSON FOSDlCK|
Something Inside Us to Sail by
 Is Essential to Real Personality

before I will budge a jot; for $ owe my conscience to no mortal man." The genuine Christian is not merely the niheritor of a vreedal tradition, or the passive servant of an accepted code; his motive power is inward and dy- namic-I live; yet not I, but Christ hveth in me-
 Many 8 youth experiments with doing in Rome as the Romans do; like a chameleon, he takes the moral color of his various social environments and SO manages to feel at home in diverse ways of living, from unreStrained loose- ness to formal responsibility. He defends this by a theory in &C., cordance with which, as one mod ern writer expresses it, mortality lis really nothing but & fashion, which changes from one year to another, from one country to an- other, from one place to another, and more especially from one person to another, as surely as the fashion and taste in hats or furni- ture."
 Soon or late, however, he runs upon 8 stubborn fact. Conduct tends, one way or another, to de- velop pattern; it becomes set and habitual. One cannot be a night-club habitue, a devoted hus- band and father, a drunkard, a good citizen, debauchee, 8 trusted businessman and 8 spendthrift all at once-or even in succession, turning at will from one to the other.
 Facing this fact, the youth sees as an alternative to his present course the uninviting prospect of surrender to conventional codes. Many modern people live in this state of ethical confusion, satisfied neither with trying to live all kinds of moral life at once nor with surrender to conventional re- probabilities.
 Their fallacy lies in the fact that both alternatives, as they conceive them, are external. Neither the at- tempt to live all sorts of ways, nor the attempt to copy the convention ally respectable, reaches far into the depths of personality. Serious ethics involves third type of living which St. Augustine enjoined when he said Love God and do as you please" That is to say, goodness, to be gen. uine and dependable, must spring from within, from 1nsights, loves, and devotions personally possessed. Let these interior tastes and affec- tions be right and one can do as one pleaSes to the profit of the world. AS Jesus said, "A good tree can- not bring forth evil fruit" There are thus not two, but three major types of ethical living: trying all the moral fashions there are; &C., cepting the conventional code; opening oneself in the depths of ones personality to such faiths, loves, and royalties, that ones ethical quality inevitably comes from living up to them and out from them.
 These three major types of moral living are illustrated in the historic experience of mariners. In the early days seamen faced a dis agreeable choice, either to risk unguided adventure on the high seas, with no help of chart or compass, or else to restrict them selves to the coastline and beat up and down the shore. The solution of their problem came with the mariners compass, and what that did was to put inside each ship something to sail by. Something inside to sail by is essential to real personality, and nowhere more evidently than in ethical living.
 Every significant ethical system, one way or another, has recog- nized this fact, and it is the es- sential element in Jesus teaching. All his emphases strike inward so the quality of life from which outward conduct comes. Freedom from hate, not simply from the act of murder; from lust, not sim ply from adultery; from insincer- ity, not simply from perjury such inwardness is characteristic of his ethical message. To him a real person must be right.
 TOMORROW: Wrongly patterned. lives.
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