A MODERN "SYMPOSIUM." 



53 



ours, and administering this world as a school of 

 character. 



To this result our moral experience naturally 

 runs up, and stops short of it only where its 

 course is artificially arrested. Till it is reached, 

 the ethical demands upon us seem to address us 

 in tones too portentous for their immediate sig- 

 nificance; remorse clings to us with a tenacity, 

 aspiration returns upon us with a power, which 

 reason cannot adequately justify. But in the 

 presence of an objective moral law pervading the 

 universe, administered by a Mind wherein it per- 

 fectly lives, and continued for man beyond his 

 present term of years, the scale of the ethical 

 passions, and the intensity of admiration and 

 reverence for the good, fall into proportionate 

 place, and escape the irony of being at once the 

 ultimate nobleness and the supreme extravagance 

 of our nature. Religion, on this side, is but the 

 open blossom of the moral germs implanted with- 

 in us — the explicit form, developed in thought, 

 of faiths implicitly contained in the sense of 

 responsibility and the forebodings of guilt. Its 

 effect, therefore, is to suffuse with a divine light 

 relations and duties which before were simply 

 personal and social. 



A similar transfiguration befalls the pleasures 

 and pains attending voluntary conduct, and con- 

 stituting its natural " sanctions." Treated as 

 ultimate facts, they can never acquire more than 

 a prudential significance. Treated as symbolical 

 lineaments of a world under moral government, 

 they are invested with an expression of charac- 

 ter, and look into us with living eyes. Their ap- 

 peal alights no longer on self-regarding hope and 

 fear, but on the springs of sympathy and shame : 

 they pass from sensitive to ethical phenomena. 

 The new and ideal meaning thus given to a large 

 portion of actual human experience cannot pause 

 there ; it completes itself in the congenial antici- 

 pation of a further and invisible store of awards 

 consummating the incipient justice of this world. 

 The faith in a future life — where it is more than 

 a belief at second hand — has its sheet-anchor in 

 the moral affections. But for the felt interval 

 between what we are and what we ought to be, 

 for the indignation at wrong, for compassion 

 toward innocent suffering, and reverence for high 

 excellence, vaticinations of renewed existence 

 would have no origin and no support. 



In assigning this method of growth to religion, 

 I do not mean to deny that it may have otber 

 lines of formation. The Nature-worship which 

 plays so great a part in ancient civilization has a 

 different history, and stands in much less inti- 



mate relations with the moral life of its votaries. 

 We pay, I am disposed to think, too great a com- 

 pliment to the Greek mythology when we attrib- 

 ute the ethical decay of later Athens and Corinth 

 to the growing skepticism about its gods. The 

 public life was dead. The theatre of great pas- 

 sion and great action was closed. The calls for 

 sacrifice, the opportunities for national expansion, 

 were gone, and the political school for the dis- 

 cipline of character was no longer there. With 

 the loss of a progressive history, the springs of 

 heroic emulation Suffered atrophy, a sickly hue 

 passed over literature, philosophy, and art ; and 

 the subsidence of human loves and cares upon 

 low Epicurean levels was inevitable, though the 

 Olympian deities had never been dethroned. In 

 the absence of any moral religion, no efficacious 

 resistance could be set up, with or without a pan- 

 theistic polytheism, against the canker of social 

 degeneracy. 



In dealing with the present problem, how- 

 ever, we confine our attention to the Christian 

 type of religion, which has its hold upon our 

 nature from the moral side. The question is, 

 what practical effect might be expected from a 

 decay of that religion. 



Under that change morality would lose, not 

 its base, but its summit. The ground and prin- 

 ciples of duty would remain ; the means for de- 

 ducing rules of action, estimating the worth of 

 conflicting impulses, and measuring the grades 

 of obligation, would in the main be unaffected ; 

 so that the moral code which would emerge from 

 the labors of a mere philosopher need not mate- 

 rially differ from that recognized by a Christian. 

 This is only an inverse method of saying that 

 the Christian ethics are true to human life and 

 the expression of right reason. I do not think, 

 therefore, that the form and contents of a moral 

 system would be essentially modified by the de- 

 cline of religious belief. It may, no doubt, hap- 

 pen that particular problems of conduct, as in 

 the cases of suicide and of marriage, have be- 

 come the subjects of ecclesiastical legislation, 

 and so have passed into preoccupation of reli- 

 gious feeling, and, on the disappearance of that 

 feeling, may be flung back into an indeterminate 

 condition. But to the real solution of such 

 problems it would be difficult to show that reli- 

 gion contributes any new elements, so as to turn 

 into duty that which was not duty before. Its 

 ministers and temporary interpreters can give an 

 historical consecration to all sorts of ungrounded 

 opinions, and these will in any case have to look 

 out for an adequate base, whether or not the re- 



