is especially grateful to the Anglo-Saxon temperament. It gives a comfortable feeling of concreteness; it enables one to bring his religion down to the level of a business transaction. With this practicality, indeed, often goes a fine scorn for the speculative thinker as the willing dupe of his own idle fancies-a scorn which is sometimes but a Diogenes' cloak for an intellectual self-confidence as imperturbable as it is uncritical. To be sure, anti-intellectualism is to-day the fashion both in religion and in philosophy. But any anti-intellectualism gives us pause when it is pushed to the extent that one glories in it as a religious asset. "One of our premiers once said," writes Principal Forsyth, "that the sterling British mind neither liked nor understood cleverness. How true it is. How fortunate that it is true. . . . The world is neither to be understood nor managed by sheer talent, logic, or knowledge. The greatest movements in the world have been irrational, or at least non-logical. And the irrationality of the world, the faith of a principle which flows underneath reason on the one hand, and of a power which rises beyond it on the other, and even seems to reverse it, has done more to keep religion quick and deep than any sense of the world's intelligent nature or consistent course. Faith, which is the greatest power of history, flourishes, and even exults, in the offense of the cross, and the paradox of the spirit."1 This glorification of obscurantism will hardly appeal to a scientifically-trained generation. Even in religious matters we are no longer content to "muddle through by sheer dint of blind faith and let the intellect tidy up the corners afterward.

It is through the spread of science that men have become convinced that truth on any subject can only be attained through long and arduous research. The difficulty of the attainment of truth and the sense of the relativity of our knowledge on the fundamental problems of existence has played no small part in educating the scientific mind into a high and holy regard for the truth. But let an indi1 "Intellectualism and Faith," Hibbert Journal, Vol. 11, p. 311.

vidual or a group of individuals become possessed by the conviction that ultimate truth on a problem as vital and as difficult as religion is to be gained through a simple emotional attitude and to a large extent in spite of the reason, and the result is a superficial and false conception as to the nature of truth. A mental atmosphere is created in which the cultivation of strict intellectual integrity is difficult. Hence the undeniable fact that a high and holy regard for truth is rare among theologians of the old school; it is a product of science. Laxity of thought is nowhere more in evidence than in religious matters. Any sort of apologetics or pseudoscience is thought justifiable provided it tends to support a religious belief. It may be seriously doubted whether there is anywhere in our modern life such widespread and unchallenged disregard of scientific thinking as in the setting forth. of religious truth in the average pulpit.

When we bear in mind the suggestive power of an institution that employs by all the many-sided appeal of ritual, creed, sacred symbols, music, the spoken word, the crowd psychosis, and is sanctioned by the highest and holiest loyalties, we gain some idea of the vast power exercised by the church in shaping the intellectual standards of the average man. The following statement of Lecky's, made with reference to the middle ages, has its significance also for the present: "When, for example, theologians during a long period have inculcated habits of credulity, rather than habits of inquiry; when they have persuaded men that it is better to cherish prejudice than to analyze it; better to stifle every doubt of what they have been taught than honestly to investigate its value, they will at last succeed in forming habits of mind that will instinctively and habitually recoil from all impartiality and intellectual honesty. If men continually violate a duty they may at last cease to feel its obligations ". Towards the close of the middle ages human nature took fearful revenge for the shackling of the intellect through the ecclesiastical ethic. For during the twelfth century when an intellectual awakening began to stir in 1 History of European Morals, Vol. I, p. 98.

Europe, the masses of men who had not been taught the meaning of honest doubt, mistook these strange uneasy whisperings for the voice of the devil and, turning upon each other in a terror-stricken attempt to stifle the spirit of unrest, burned innocent fellow-men as witches at the stake or tore them on the wheel. The witch-burning manias and heresy trials of the late middle ages were in part only a crude attempt to still the mental anguish of suspended judgment. Thus did human nature avenge itself against a purblind churchly ethic which in cursing doubt cursed the powers of reason and the legitimate result of its exercise. The code of ethics or the institution that stigmatizes honest doubt or reasoned disbelief chokes the spiritual life of man at its fountain-head and prepares for itself an inevitable day of reckoning.

§ 7. AUTHORITARIANISM AND MORALS

Given a system of ethics in which there is no place for development in the true sense, where moral science consists simply in elucidating and applying to new situations as they arise great ethical principles laid down authoritatively once for all, and it will be seen that we have a situation in which casuistry is encouraged. Familiar illustrations of what is meant are afforded by the effort of the average Sabbath-school teacher to reconcile the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount with prevailing ethical ideals in business and politics. Without any attempt at a scholarly understanding of the background of these utterances of Jesus, but with a naïve assumption that they must be true for all time and for every conceivable social order, the expositor proceeds to extract from them meanings which will fit modern conditions. In this wise these beautiful sayings are placed at the mercy of all the sophistical pros and cons, the forced and mechanical adjustments which logical ingenuity can devise. They become mere verbal supports upon which one may hang at will his arbitrary interpretations of what the unalterable principles of Christian ethic must be. Ethics becomes, thereby, merely an appanage of

theological or personal pre-possessions and has no just claims to independence or even respectability.

It is in this casuistical atmosphere that there arises what Nietzsche calls the "holy lie ". In general, Nietzsche meant by the term any perversion of the truth that "is allowed in pursuit of holy ends ". Psychologically, the "holy lie" is more than that. It is a form of self-deception that results from the organization of religious or other loyalties around ideas which are false or have become discredited. It is a familiar fact that every strongly organized system of sentiments tends to create its own standards of value. It seeks always to vouch for the truth of its ideas. From the standpoint of the miser's master passion of avarice whatever gratifies it is true and good, whatever thwarts it is untrue and vicious. It is also a familiar fact of psychology that every system of sentiments strives to become supreme and to subordinate all the other elements of personality to the end it seeks to realize. Hence, it is not uncommon where powerful sentiments become thoroughly organized around certain sets of ideas, as in religion, that this system of sentiments may domi- nate the entire personality and shape notions of truth as well as ideals of conduct.

The effect of an authoritarian ethic is to organize the emotions and sentiments around certain sacred objects such as a relic, the cross, the Bible, or the church. These objects take on in this wise unique authority and significance. The word of God and its official interpreter are taken up into the powerful system of religious sentiment of the individual believer and acquire thereby values which they do not possess when considered on their own merits. The emotions fed by the religious and moral teachings of the Bible overflow, as it were, and lend to the book a fictitious value from the standpoint of history or science. The powerful but uncritical emotional life leads captive reason and the critical powers. Intelligent persons constantly contend for the historical trustworthiness of the first chapters of Genesis but not because they provide satisfactory scientific explanations of the origin of the world or the begin

nings of the race. The system of sentiment organized about the sacred book demands that nothing shall detract from its holiness and its power to satisfy religious needs. To admit that any part of it is a myth is felt to militate against this sentiment and is therefore rejected. There can be little doubt that the one factor which resisted and still resists most stubbornly all efforts to apply scientific method to the interpretation of the sacred scriptures is this organization of the religious sentiments and the false conceptions of truth to which it gives rise.

In a similar fashion, the clergy have suffered from false estimates of their character and their social significance. Throughout the middle ages the priest was forced to live the unreal, anti-social life of the celibate. In Protestantism the clergyman is always in danger of becoming more or less of a moral poseur. A false estimate is placed on his abilities so that his poorest jokes and most platitudinous discourses are praised as creations of genius; accustomed to being listened to as an oracle, too often he becomes impatient of criticism and does not fight fair in an argument; as the expounder of a final body of authoritative truth he feels no incentive to patient criticism or to originality of thought; he is made the recipient of privileges and immunities both legal and social which often endanger his own sense of manliness and self-respect and do not elevate him in the esteem of the secular ethic; by no fault of his own his character is often pauperized, his thought and vocabulary stereotyped, his moral judgments dulled by privilege and convention. These are the results of the artificial atmosphere of an authoritarian ethic.

Finally, an authoritarian ethic militates against a vigorous morality in that it encourages the separation of religious devotion from civic righteousness. Observers have noted a certain moral obtuseness among Latin peoples long subjected to the casuistical atmosphere of an authoritarian ethics and the confessional. But this "non-moral type of Christianity" is not confined to Latin peoples. It is found in communities where Protestantism of the most pronounced type has long enjoyed