THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY. 343 



sisting in the implied disobedience to the supposed commands, and 

 not as consisting in its intrinsic character as causing suffering to 

 others or to self. Inevitably the effect on sociological thinking is, 

 that institutions and actions are judged more by their apparent con- 

 gruity or incongruity with the established cult than by their tenden- 

 cies to further or to hinder well-being. 



This effect of the theological bias, manifest enough everywhere, 

 has been forced on my attention by one whose mental attitude often 

 supplies me with matter for speculation an old gentleman who unites 

 the religion of amity and the religion of enmity in startling contrast. 

 On the one hand, getting up early to his devotions, going to church 

 even at great risk to his feeble health, always staying for the sacra- 

 ment when there is one, he displays what is ordinarily regarded as an 

 exemplary piety. On the other hand, his thoughts ever tend in the 

 direction of warfare : fights on sea and land furnish topics of undying 

 interest to him ; he revels in narratives of destruction ; his talk is of 

 cannon. To say that he divides his reading between the Bible and 

 Alison, or some kindred book, is an exaggeration ; but still it serves 

 to convey an idea of his state of feeling. Now you may hear him 

 waxing wroth over the disestablishment of the Irish Church, which he 

 looks upon as an act of sacrilege ; and now, when the conversation 

 turns on works of art, he names, as engravings which above all others 

 he admires, Coeur-de-Lion fighting Saladin, and Wellington at Water- 

 loo. Or, after manifesting some kindly feeling, which, to give him his 

 due, he frequently does, he will shortly pass to some bloody encounter, 

 the narration of which makes his voice tremulous with delight. Mar- 

 velling though I did at first over these incongruities of sentiment and 

 belief, the explanation was reached on observing that the subordination- 

 element of his creed was far more dominant in his consciousness than 

 the moral element. Watching the movements of his mind made it 

 clear that, to his imagination, God was symbolized as a kind of tran- 

 scendently powerful sea-captain, and made it clear that he went to 

 church from a feeling akin to that with which, as a middy, he went to 

 muster. On perceiving that this, which is the sentiment common to 

 all religions, whatever be the name or ascribed nature of the deity 

 worshipped, was supreme in him, it ceased to be inexplicable that the 

 sentiment to which the Christian religion specially appeals should be 

 so readily overridden. It became easier to understand how, when the 

 Hyde-Park riots took place, he could wish that we had Louis Napoleon 

 over here to shoot down the mob, and how he could recall, with more 

 or less of chuckling, the deeds of press-gangs in his early days. 



That the theological bias, thus producing conformity to moral prin- 

 ciples from motives of obedience only, and not habitually insisting on 

 such principles because of their intrinsic value, obscures sociological 

 truths, will now not be difficult to see. The tendency is to substitute 

 formal recognitions of such principles for real recognitions. So long 



