Morality as a Religion | Page 7

man's
sense of law.
Ethics cold! Then what else is left to inspire to us? We are bankrupt.
What is there in all the Churches to help humanity if not their
ethics--ethics which are not the perquisite of any sect, no mere
provincialism of any Church or nation, but the heirloom of mankind?
What, we ask, is there to cheer the heart in the Thirty-nine Articles, the
Vatican decrees, or the Westminster Confession? What mysterious

inspiration lurks in the dogmas of the Oriental councils of 1600 years
ago, dogmas to be believed to-day under peril of perishing
everlastingly? We do not concede that the ethical Church has no
message to the heart, no comfort for the emotions, no solace to the
deeply tried and afflicted. A Church which preaches the imperishability
of every good deed, the final and decisive victory of the good; which
reveals to us not only mind, but beneficence, as the character of the
supreme Power in the universe; which bids us remember that as that
Power is, so are we, moral beings to our heart's core, and, in
consequence, to take the place which belongs to us at the side of the
infinite righteousness for the furtherance of the good--such a Church,
such a religion is not destitute of enthusiasm and inspiration. A
philosophy such as this, a religion such as this, will one day sweep the
English-speaking countries in a tempest of enthusiasm. It will be
welcomed as the final settlement of the conflicting claims of mind and
heart in man, the reconciliation of the feud too long existing between
religion and science. Everything points to its immense future. Within
the churches its principles are tacitly accepted as irrefutable. We claim
such men as Stanley, Maurice and Jowett as preachers of the ethical
Church, and their numbers are increasing every year among the
cultured members of the Anglican clergy. Leading men of science are
no longer committed to a purely negative philosophy, while one and all
would be prepared to admit that if religion we are to have it must be
one in complete harmony with the moral sentiment in the best men; in
other words, a Church founded on moral science, the ideal of the
saintly Jesus, and of all the prophets of the race.

NOTE.--"I can conceive the existence of a Church in which, week by
week, services should be devoted, not to the iteration of abstract
propositions in theology, but to the setting before men's minds of an
ideal of true, just and pure living: a place in which those who are weary
of the burden of daily cares should find a moment's rest in the
contemplation of the higher life which is possible for all, though
attained by so few; a place in which the man of strife and of business
should have time to think how small after all are the rewards he covets
compared with peace and charity. Depend upon it, if such a Church

existed, no one would seek to disestablish it."--HUXLEY. I know not
what better words could be chosen wherewith to describe the ethical
Church.

II
ETHICS AND SCIENCE.
Since the era of the re-birth of learning, each successive century has
been generally distinguishable by some marked intellectual
development, by some strong movement which has taken deep hold of
the minds of men. Thus the Renascimento period was followed by the
century of the Reformation, and that again by the inauguration of the
era of modern philosophy, while the eighteenth century has been
claimed as the Saeculum Rationalisticum, the age of rationalism, in
which the claims of reason were pushed to the forefront in the domains
of religion and politics. Nothing remained after that but an age of
physical science, and surely enough has been given us in the nineteenth
century which may with equal accuracy be termed the Saeculum
Scientificum.
It cannot be doubted that a sort of mental intoxication has been set up
as a result of the extraordinary successes which have rewarded the
efforts of scientific investigators. Everything now-a-days is expressed
in terms of science and its formulae. Evolution is the keynote to the
learning of the age. Thus Mr. Spencer's system of the Synthetic
Philosophy is a bold and comprehensive attempt to take up the whole
knowable, and express it anew in the language of development. It is
emphatically, professedly, the philosophy of evolution, the rigid
application of a purely scientific formula to everything capable of
philosophical treatment. Now, having discussed the question of ethics
and religion, their distinction and their intimate relations; having shown
how that religion comes as the crown and glory of the ethical life, the
transfiguration of the ethical ideal and the most powerful stimulus
towards the realisation in practice of what is conceived as theoretically
desirable, it