Loyalty to Loyalty: Josiah Royce and the Genuine Moral Life

"If there is no other message to be taken from my book, let it be this. Our lives have sense and meaning if and only if we are loyal, and our lives are genuinely moral if and only if our loyalty is loyal to loyalty. Such loyal living is what recognises and strives to fulfil the universal need to be helped, devoting our loyal service according to our unique capacities, aptitudes, relationships, interests and talents.

In our quest to live loyally, we will undoubtedly endure times of defeat. Such setbacks may be occasioned by causes failing to meet fruition, [...] or the unconscionable committing of disloyalty to ourselves. But none of this setbacks is permanent, even when all indications seem to suggest so. [...]
If loyalty is what makes life meaningful, then a defeat of one's loyalty must never be taken as final. To do so is not merely to commit moral suicide, as Royce describes disloyalty, but to commit suicide without qualification! No loyalty, no meaning. No meaning, no me.
[...]
'One who has found his loyalty is indeed, a first, under the obsession of the new spirit of grace. But if, henceforth, he lives with a will of his own, he can, by a wilful closing of his eyes to the light, become disloyal'".