THE MORAL INFLUENCES OF PRIESTHOODS. 811 



developed social life would have been possible in the 

 absence of the capacity for continuous labour; and out of 

 the idle improvident savage there could not have been 

 evolved the industrious citizen, without a long-continued and 

 rigorous coercion. The religious sanction habitually given 

 in early societies to rigid class-distinctions and the con 

 comitant slavery, must be regarded as having conduced to a 

 modification of nature which furthered civilization. 



A discipline allied and yet different, to which superior 

 as well as inferior classes have been subjected by Eccle 

 siastical Institutions, has been the discipline of asceticism. 

 Considered in the abstract asceticism is indefensible. As 

 already shown ( 140 and 620) it grew out of the desire 

 to propitiate malicious ghosts and diabolical deities; and 

 even as displayed among ourselves at present, we may trace 

 in it the latent belief that God is pleased by voluntarily- 

 borne mortifications and displeased by pursuit of gratifi 

 cations. But if instead of regarding self-infliction of suffering, 

 bodily or mental, from the stand-point of absolute ethics, 

 we regard it from the stand-point of relative ethics, as an 

 educational regimen, we shall see that it has had a use, and 

 perhaps a great use. The common trait of all ascetic acts is 

 submission to a pain to avoid some future greater pain, 

 or relinquishment of a pleasure to obtain some greater 

 pleasure hereafter. In either case there is sacrifice of the 

 immediate to the remote. This is a sacrifice which the 

 uncivilized man cannot make ; which the inferior among 

 the civilized can make only to a small extent ; and which 

 only the better among the civilized can make in due degree. 

 Hence we may infer that the discipline which, beginning 

 with the surrendering of food, clothing, etc., to the ancestral 

 ghost, and growing into the voluntary bearing of hunger, 

 cold, or pain, to propitiate deities, has greatly aided in 

 developing the ability to postpone present to future. 

 Possibly only a motive so powerful as that of terror of 

 the supernatural, could have strengthened the habit of self- 



