TEACHING OF RELIGION AND MORALITY 283 



Whether it work for good or for evil depends on its relationships 

 with the totality of life. If religion is essentially related to the unity 

 of complete living, then religion makes for morality; otherwise not. 



This requirement of unity is violated whenever religion and 

 morality are looked upon as having to do with different and mutually 

 exclusive realms, with different and distinct actions, days, places, 

 standards. It is violated whenever morality is limited to human 

 relations and duties, religion being confined to such other matters 

 as pertain to God, as if I could ever owe a duty to my brother 

 without owing it to God at the same time; and as if I could ever 

 fully do my duty to my brother without seeing in him a child of 

 our common Father. And it is violated whenever those upspringing 

 impulses of human nature, which when nourished and guided become 

 priceless elements of strength and beauty and enrichment, are tram- 

 pled on, starved, and spurned in the name of " religion; " when- 

 ever in the name of " religion " sacrifice is substituted for mercy; 

 whenever the palpable fact of unrighteousness is looked upon as not 

 so unrighteous if done by a pillar of the Church, as if there were 

 something he might do in church or on Sunday, with reference to 

 higher powers, to mitigate, in his case, the hard mandates of the 

 moral law; and whenever there exists the practice of discounting the 

 morality of the man who is undeniably upright in life, but who is not 

 apparently " religious," instead of taking the equally consistent 

 and more charitable ground that if (or since) this man is righteous, 

 he must have some religion. 



The idea is of slow growth that morality and religion are essen- 

 tially at one, and that each applies to every department of life. One 

 hears tell of " religious duties," and other duties not religious; of 

 " working for yourself " part of the time, and " Can you not spare 

 one day in seven in which to work for God ?"- as if a righteously 

 religious man, whose God is conceived as " nearer than breathing," 

 could ever be working purely for his own self or his own pocket any 

 of the time. 



The use of the word spiritual in a certain familiar restricted sense 

 is a case in point. A person's spiritual welfare is sometimes spoken 

 of as if it entirely concerned his future salvation, or his churchly life. 

 A spiritual person is (or perhaps I should say, used to be) commonly 

 thought to be a person in whom sentiment is more strongly developed 

 than practicality. But the term spirit, and its derivatives, may 

 properly be applied to the higher life of the human mind as a whole. 

 To give a cup of cold water in the name of a disciple (in any one of the 

 myriad ways possible in modern life) is not the less, but the more, 

 spiritual because it is practical. It is a loss to morality to use a term 

 like spirit as if its connotations were wholly religious; it is a gain 

 to religion as well as to morality when a noble word is made to em- 



