Page:Moral Obligation to be Intelligent.djvu/166

 responsibility and rescue, has been stretched in our fiction until it misrepresents the consequences of wrongdoing, and even diminishes, strangely enough, that sense of social responsibility from which it sprang. We felt to blame for letting our fellow-man become a criminal, but after the story or the play has demonstrated how excellent morally the criminal is, we feel less guilty. In such tales, however, there is always an inconsistency; the hero is singled out for admiration, but his comrades in guilt are saved by no miracle—so much is conceded to our general knowledge of the facts.

Another illustration may be drawn from a very different region of interest, from those stories or plays, like The Passing of the Third Floor Back, or The Servant in the House, which show the miraculous influence of a perfect