. WHAT IS RELIGION ? 243 



of university education ! [ Until this lie is eradicated, 

 truth 2 cannot be perceived and morality can hardly 

 exist. 3 



1 " It has to be confessed that in England during the nineteenth 

 century the educated classes, in almost all the great political changes 

 that have been effected, have taken the side of the party afterwards 

 admitted to have been in the wrong, they have almost invariably 

 opposed at the time the measures they have subsequently come to 

 defend and justify. This is to be noticed alike of measures which 

 have extended education, which have emancipated trade, which have 

 extended the franchise. The educated classes have even, it must be 

 confessed, opposed measures which have tended to secure religious 

 freedom and to abolish slavery. The motive force behind the long 

 list of progressive measures carried during this period has in scarcely 

 any appreciable measure come from the educated classes ; it has come 

 almost exclusively from the middle and lower classes, who have in 

 turn acted, not under the stimulus of intellectual motives, but under 

 the influence of their altruistic feelings." (" Social Evolution," 

 Benjamin Kidd, 1895, p. 250.) 



2 " Truth is truth, and fact is fact, and that it is always better to 

 act and to believe in conformity with truth and fact, than to indulge in 

 illusions. There are many things in Nature which jar on our feelings 

 and seem harsh and disagreeable, but yet are hard facts, which we 

 have to recognize and make the best of. Childhood does not pass 

 into manhood without exchanging much that is innocent and attrac- 

 tive for much that is stern and prosaic. Death, with its prodigal 

 waste of immature life, its sudden extinction of mature life in the 

 plenitude of its powers, its heart-rending separations from loved 

 objects, is a most disagreeable fact. But it would not improve 

 matters to keep grown-up lads in nurseries for fear of their meeting 

 with accidents, or becoming hardened by contact with the world. 

 Progress, not happiness, is the law of the world ; and to improve 

 himself and others by constant struggles upwards is the true 

 destiny of man." (" Modern Science and Modern Thought," S. 

 Laing, 1896, p. 104.) 



3 " So far from morality being a thing altogether apart from 



human nature, and which owes its obligation solely to its being a 



revelation of God's will, it may be truly said in a great many cases 



R 2 ' 



