“Ah no,” said Gildea, “he is something better; he is religion! It is immoral to commit adultery: it is moral to punish it: (‘Infinitely better that they should atone for it, than lose a step towards a higher life’): it is religious, not to condemn it, but to bid go and sin no more. It is immoral to take your share in your father’s substance and waste it in violent living: it is moral to punish this prodigal, to whom repentance has only come with a belly that was fain to fill itself with the husks of the swine: it is religious to kill the fatted calf for such a penitent, and rejoice and make glad. Jesus’ sole criticism on practical morality, on the realization of an ethical code in everyday life, is, that ‘it was not so from the beginning.’”
“Just so; but this is precisely the difference of the ethical code of the Old and of the New Dispensation.”
“Will you let me say, that it has nothing to do with any ethical code at all? For, surely, the essence of ethical codes is justice, and the essence of the religious code, of the code of Jesus, is love. The Amazon may be a big river, but you shall compass all time in trying to put into it the unspeakable ocean.—No, it is just here that, as Fitzgerald would say, all these good people are superstitious. They believe that the spiritual progress of humanity is synonymous with the progress of one portion of the spirit of humanity, namely the ethical portion; and this, being a belief in a thing not worthy of that belief, may justly, as it seems to me, be denominated a superstition. It is superstition without religion.”
“And what, then,” asked Maddock, “do you call the belief of men like your friend Hawkesbury?”
“Those who are immoral? men and women who, as most of these Socialists, work in the spirit of Jesus and act (as a polemist would say) in the manner of Bradlaugh?—what is their belief?”
“Yes,” said Maddock.
“Why, clearly,” answered Gildea smiling, “religion with superstition! The men of enthusiasm like Hawkesbury, and the men of morality like Judge Parker, are surely both of them right, and surely both of them wrong: right in their appreciation of the truth of one portion of the spiritual life, wrong in their ignorance of another portion. They both possess truth, and they both possess superstition.”
“And what of a man like our friend Alcock here, who is ignorant of religion and more or less lax as regards morality?”