PROLEGOMENA TO ETHICS. 129 



(p. 306), we cannot help feeling that the fear lest we 

 of the modern world should think ourselves " better 

 than our fathers" often leads him to minimize the 

 real difference between the highest moral systems 

 of the pre-Christian age and the ethics of Chris- 

 tianity : 



" Religious teachers," Professor Green tells us, " have, no 

 doubt, affected the hopes and fears which actuate us in the 

 pursuit of virtue, or rouse us from its neglect. Religious 

 societies have both strengthened men in the performance of 

 recognized duties and taught them to recognize relations 

 of duty towards those whom they might otherwise have been 

 content to treat as beyond the pale of such duties ; but the 

 articulated scheme of what the virtues and duties are in 

 their difference and in their unity remains for us now in its 

 main outlines what the Greek philosophers left it." 



If " religious teachers " and " religious societies " 

 include Christ and the Catholic Church this is 

 surely misleading. It fails to recognize what Chris- 

 tianity did for the moral ideal, and still more the 

 new power which it gave for the realizing of that 

 ideal. We have not the slightest wish to underrate 

 the results of Greek ethics or to deny the fact that 

 much of the teaching of Aristotle is final. But it 

 seems to us not only inadequate, but unfair to 

 credit the philosopher with the doctrine that " every 

 form of real goodness must rest on a wish to be 

 good, which has no object but its own fulfilment " 

 (p. 271), and then to contrast with this "the appeal 

 to semi-sensual motives which has been common 



K 



