THE PROPOSED SUBSTITUTES FOR RELIGION. 



433 



appeared of late a disposition to make conces- 

 sions on the subject of human volition hardly con- 

 sistent with materialism. Nothing can be more 

 likely than that the impetus of great discoveries 

 has carried the discoverers too far. 



Perhaps with the promptings of the religious 

 sentiment there is combined a sense of the im- 

 mediate danger with which the failure of the re- 

 ligious sanction threatens social order and mo- 

 rality. As we have said already, the men of whom 

 we specially speak are far above anything like 

 social Jesuitism. We have not a doubt but they 

 would regard with abhorrence any schemes of 

 oligarchic illuminism for guarding the pleasures 

 of the few by politic deception of the multitude. 

 But they have probably begun to lay to heart the 

 fact that the existing morality, though not de- 

 pendent on any special theology, any special view 

 of the relations between soul and body, or any 

 special theory of future rewards and punish- 

 ments, is largely dependent on a belief in the in- 

 defeasible authority of conscience, and in that 

 without which conscience can have no indefeasible 

 authority — the presence of a just and all-seeing 

 God. It may be true that in primeval society 

 these beliefs are found only in the most rudimen- 

 tary form, and, as social sanctions, are very in- 

 ferior in force to mere gregarious instincts or the 

 pressure of tribal need. But man emerges from 

 the primeval state, and, when he does, he demands 

 a reason for his submission to moral law. That 

 the leaders of the anti-theological movement in 

 the present day are immoral, nobody but the 

 most besotted fanatic would insinuate ; no candid 

 antagonist would deny that some of them are in 

 every respect the very best of men. The fearless 

 love of truth is usually accompanied by other 

 high qualities, and nothing could be more unlike- 

 ly than that natures disposed to virtue, trained 

 under good influences, peculiarly sensitive to 

 opinion and guarded by intellectual tastes, would 

 lapse into vice as soon as the traditional sanction 

 wa3 removed. But what is to prevent the with- 

 drawal of the traditional sanction from producing 

 its natural effect upon the morality of the mass of 

 mankind ? The commercial swindler or the po- 

 litical sharper, when the divine authority of con- 

 science is gone, will feel that he has only the 

 opinion of society to reckon with, and he knows 

 how to reckon with the opinion of society. If 

 Macbeth is ready, provided he can succeed in this 

 world, to "jump the life to come," much more 

 ready will villainy be to "jump " the bad conse- 

 quences of its actions to humanity when its own 

 64 



conscious existence shall have closed. Rate the 

 practical effect of religious beliefs as low and that 

 of social influences as high as you may, there can 

 surely be no doubt that morality has received 

 some support from the authority of an inward 

 monitor regarded as the voice of God. The 

 worst of men would have wished to die the death 

 of the righteous ; he would have been glad, if he 

 could, when death approached, to cancel his 

 crimes ; and the conviction, or misgiving, which 

 this implied, could not fail to have some influence 

 upon the generality of mankind, though no doubt 

 the influence was weakened rather than strength- 

 ened by the extravagant and incredible form in 

 which the doctrine of future retribution was pre- 

 sented by the dominant theology. 



The denial of the existence of God and of a 

 future state, in a word, is the dethronement of 

 conscience ; and society will pass, to say the 

 least, through a dangerous interval before social 

 science can fill the vacant throne. Avowed skep- 

 ticism is likely to be disinterested and therefore 

 to be moral ; it is among the unavowed skeptics 

 and conformists to political religions that the 

 consequences of the change maybe expected to 

 appear. But more than this, the doctrines of 

 Natural Selection and the Survival of the Fittest 

 are beginning to generate a morality of their 

 own, with the inevitable corollary that the proof 

 of superior fitness is to survive— to survive either 

 by force or cunning, like the other animals which 

 by dint of force or cunning have come out vic- 

 torious from the universal war and asserted for 

 themselves a place in Nature. The " irrepressible 

 struggle for empire " is formally put forward by 

 public writers of the highest class as the basis 

 and the rule of the conduct of thi3 country tow- 

 ard other nations ; and we may be sure that 

 there is not an entire absence of connection be- 

 tween the private code of a school and its inter- 

 national conceptions. The feeling that success 

 covers everything seems to be gaining ground, 

 and to be overcoming, not merely the old conven- 

 tional rules of honor, but moral principle itself. 

 Both in public and private there are symptoms of 

 an approaching failure of the motive power which 

 has hitherto sustained men both in self-sacrificing 

 effort and in courageous protest against wrong, 

 though as yet we are only at the threshold of the 

 great change, and established sentiment long sur- 

 vives, in the masses, that which originally gave it 

 birth. Renan says, probably with truth, that 

 had the Second Empire remained at peace, it 

 might have gone on forever ; and in the history 



