48 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



not believe in sacraments, and that marriage is a 

 sacrament. 



Now, let us suppose for the sake of argument 

 that it could be shown that, if all theological 

 considerations were set aside, it would be desira- 

 ble that a person dying of cancer should be per- 

 mitted to commit suicide, and that a man whose 

 wife was incurably mad should be allowed to 

 marry again ; and that, on the other hand, if 

 theological considerations were taken into ac- 

 count, the opposite was desirable. Upon these 

 suppositions the question whether the theologi- 

 cal beliefs which make the difference are bene- 

 ficial or not will depend on the question whether 

 they are true or not. Applied generally, this 

 shows that the support which an existing creed 

 gives to an existing system of morals is irrele- 

 vant to its truth, and that the question whether 

 a given system of morals is good or bad cannot 

 be fully determined until after the determination 

 of the question whether the theology on which it 

 rests is true or false. The morality is good if it 

 is founded on a true estimate of the consequences 

 of human actions. But if it is founded on a false 

 theology, it is founded on a false estimate of the 

 consequences of human actions ; and, so far as 

 that is the case, it cannot be good ; and the cir- 

 cumstance that it is supported by the theology 

 to which it refers is an argument against, and 

 not in favor of, that theology. 



Lord SELBORNE. — I begin by observing 

 that (putting special cases aside, and looking at 

 the question in a general way) morality has not 

 flourished, among either civilized or uncivilized 

 men, wheD religious belief has been generally 

 lost, or utterly debased. Not to dwell upon the 

 case of savage races, the modern Hindoos and 

 Chinese have long been civilized, but are cer- 

 tainly not moral ; nor can anything worse be 

 conceived than the morality of the Greeks and 

 Romans, at the height of their civilization. The 

 morality of the Romans, in the old republican 

 times when they knew nothing of Greek philoso- 

 phy, was praised by Polybius, who connected it, 

 directly and emphatically, with the influence 

 among them of religious belief. After their in- 

 tellectual cultivation had taken its tone from the 

 irreligious or agnostic materialism of Epicurus 

 (hardly distinguishable, I think, from that sort of 

 philosophy which some persons think destined to 

 supplant religious belief in the present day), 

 their morality became what is described in the 

 first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans and 

 in the Satires of Juvenal ; nor does it seem to 

 have been worse than that of the other civilized 



races on the shores of the Mediterranean, over 

 whom, at the same time, religion had equally lost 

 its influence. 



On the other hand, it seems to me certain, as 

 an historical fact, that the place which the prin- 

 ciples of love and benevolence, humility and self- 

 abnegation, have assumed in the morality of 

 Christian nations (with a wide-spreading influence 

 which har been advancing till the present time 

 with the growth of civilization) is specifically 

 due to Christianity. To Christianity are specifi- 

 cally due — 1. Our respect for human life, which 

 condemns suicide, infanticide, political assassina- 

 tion, and I might almost say homicide generally, 

 in a way previously unknown, and still unknown 

 where Christianity does not prevail ; 2. Our rec- 

 ognition of such moral and spiritual relations 

 between man and man as are inconsistent with 

 the degradation of women, and with the practice 

 of slavery ; 3. Our reverence for the bond of 

 marriage ; and, 4. Our abhorrence of some par- 

 ticular forms of vice. I do not mean to deny 

 that traces of a state of opinion, more or less 

 similar upon some of these points, are discover- 

 able in what we know of the manners of some 

 non-Christian nations ; but it is historically true 

 to say that the prevalence of each of these prin- 

 ciples, as manifested among ourselves, is specifical- 

 ly due to Christianity. Of Christianity I speak 

 in a sense inclusive of all that it derives from the 

 antecedent Jewish system ; of which it claims 

 to be the true continuation and development. 



If freedom of inquiry is not to be stopped, 

 after the rejection of religious belief, it must 

 gradually extend itself to the whole circle of mo- 

 rality, most, if not all, of which is as little capa- 

 ble of demonstrative proof through the evidence 

 of the senses as any of the doctrines of religion. 

 Those who reject religion will not voluntarily 

 submit to moral restraints founded upon the reli- 

 gion which they reject, unless they can be placed 

 upon some other intellectual basis, sufficiently 

 cogent to themselves to resist the attractions of 

 appetite or self-interest. That large part of 

 mankind who are always too much under the 

 government of their inclinations and passions 

 will be quicker in drawing moral corollaries 

 from irreligious principles than the philosophers 

 by whom those principles are propounded ; and 

 the advanced posts of morality, in which the 

 influence of religion culminates, and of which 

 the necessity may not be so evident on natural 

 or social grounds, are not likely to be very stren- 

 uously defended by those philosophers them- 

 selves. 



