RELIGIOUS BELIEF AS A BASIS OF MORALITY. 83 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF AS A BASIS OF MORAL OBLI- 

 GATION. 



BY PROF. E. P. EVANS. 



TT^OLLOWING the primitive period of tribal ethics* comes a 

 -L 1 second stage of social and moral development, which Mr. 

 Maine calls the supersession of the bond of blood by the bond of 

 belief. Ethnocentric attraction gives way to what might be 

 called theocentric attraction, and a broader and more spiritual 

 sort of association is formed, having for its basis, not consan- 

 guinity, but conformity in religious conceptions. The god takes 

 the place of the human progenitor of the tribe, or rather grows 

 out of his deification in the evolution of ancestor worship, which 

 is probably the oldest of cults. 



Nevertheless, in this case, the fundamental principle of primi- 

 tive society, which makes friendship coextensive with kinship, is 

 not abrogated, but only enlarged in its application, causing those 

 who worship the same deities or propitiate the same demons to 

 enter into fraternal relations and call themselves brethren. 



The canonical prohibition of marriage between persons con- 

 nected merely by the artificial ties of a religious rite, such as 

 sponsors and baptized infants, godfathers, godmothers, and god- 

 children, proves how intimately the idea of ritual relationship 

 was associated with that of real relationship in the minds of 

 those who established and perpetuated this institution. This 

 fiction of sacramental kinship was at one time carried so far in 

 the papal Church as to forbid the sponsor to be joined in wed- 

 lock even to the parent of a godclild. Cohabitation between a 

 patrinus and a matrina was regarded as incest until the Council 

 of Trent removed the ecclesiastical bar to such unions. The fact 

 that they had assumed the position of spiritual parents to one in- 

 fant prevented them from becoming the real and lawful parents 

 of another infant. The importance attached to the name-day, 

 which in most Catholic countries quite supplants the birthday as 

 an anniversary, is also additional evidence of the vigor and 

 vitality of primitive conceptions as embodied in ecclesiastical 

 institutions. 



Religion is, in fact, as Schelling observes, the strongest cement 

 of primitive society, and the influence which contributes more 

 than any other to the evolution and organization of the nation 

 and state out of the tribe. Plutarch says: "Methinks a man 

 should sooner find a city built in the air, without any ground to 

 rest upon, than that any commonwealth altogether void of re- 



* See Popular Science Monthly, January, 1894. 



