286 Science Religion and Reality 



and morals a mere announcement of commands of the Deity, 

 dependent on the blessing and ban of religion for its sanctions and 

 motives, whereupon it ceases to be morals. Religion, if it be worth 

 anything, must stand in its own right ; while good is good to be 

 done for its own sake and not because an omnipotent person has 

 laid down rules and will maintain them by rewards and punishments. 



But, though this is true, it is far from being the end of the 

 matter. A religion which is not ethical is in danger of being super- 

 stition and not religion ; and an ethic which has no appeal except 

 to the visible and the useful is business, not morals. Historically, 

 too, the religious sense of the holy becomes an ethical feeling. On 

 the one hand, the natural evolution of the awesome holy is into 

 moral reverence ; and by that very thing we measure it as progress. 

 On the other, morality has always been a religious development, 

 directly related to the sense of the holy, and a real moral feeling can 

 never be wholly divorced from something at least akin to its awe. 



Professor Otto, more perhaps than any other writer, has put 

 the emphasis on the awesome holy as the essential religious 

 character, and he divides it entirely from the ethical, which he 

 regards as a quite separate development alongside of it. Yet so 

 undeniable is the close and apparently necessary connection, that, 

 after distinguishing them sharply, in the interests of his theory, he 

 maintains, in the interests of experience and common sense, that 

 they are related a priori. 



Such a position hardly needs refuting, and would not have been 

 taken up had it not been necessary, in order to afford support to a 

 non-ethical and non-rational view of religion, without denying, 

 as a consequence, the dependence of all higher religion upon both 

 ethics and reason. But how two quite separate developments 

 should be connected a priori is difficult to conceive, for it does not 

 seem to be in accord with any known form of development. In 

 every development, it matters not what may be added in the course 

 of development, when we look back, we can detect the germ of it 

 long before it appeared in separate, clearly distinguishable form. 

 And, when we thus look back on this evolution of the sense of the 

 holy, it is not difficult to discover, in every stage of it known to us, 

 the germ at least of the moral development. What, but something 

 akin to our ethical feeling, distinguishes the sense of holy awe from 

 mere fear ? We may, it is true, fail entirely to discover as yet 

 our particular ethical ideas and ethical values, but, if the feeling of 



