VI
It is clear that the Greeks are largely responsible for bringing religion in Europe to the present impasse, where many people seriously hold that if we cease to affirm the incredible and the unproven, morals will suffer, and that a boy had better believe in hell when he is entrusted with his first latch-key. But it is the Greek also who can get us out. Whatever worthy sense we attach to the word "religious," the Greeks illustrate it. Their extraordinary moral earnestness is obscured for us only by the variety of their appeals to our attention. But they never from first to last allowed religion to swallow morals. They first of men perceived and declared that morals are man-made and are constantly to be altered by man; that the state exists to secure the noblest life for the citizens; that therefore social science, by definition, (says Aristotle) deals with right conduct. Plato was deeply interested in all the problems of religion, and alive to all the religious implications of the mysterious universe in which we live; but he worked out in his masterpiece—The Republic—a complete account of the social origin and sanction of ethics. And as for his theology, "the father and maker of all this universe," said he, "is past finding out; and even if we found him, to tell of him to all men would be impossible."
Contemporary writers on religion are trying, thus far unsuccessfully, to agree on a definition of their subject. But while no one can define religion, everyone feels what it is. No society that we know of has been without it, and there is no reason to suppose that it will ever disappear. Both religion and morals are apparently social products, both are, as far as we can see, indestructible, and both have suffered cruelly from too close a union. And when they recover their independence, the religious emotion, like the other emotions, must be governed by morals.