I did so, and made myself a code of morals to live by, in which religion had but a small part.
For me there was but one sin, and that was cruelty, because I hated it; though Nature, for inscrutable purposes of her own, almost teaches it as a virtue. All sins that did not include cruelty were merely sins against health, or taste, or common-sense, or public expediency.
Free-will was impossible. We could only seem to will freely, and that only within the limits of a small triangle, whose sides were heredity, education, and circumstance—a little geometrical arrangement of my own, of which I felt not a little proud, although it does not quite go on all-fours—perhaps because it is only a triangle.
That is, we could will fast enough—too fast; but could not will how to will—fortunately, for we were not fit as yet, and for a long time to come, to be trusted, constituted as we are!
Even the characters of a novel must act according to the nature, training, and motives their creator the novelist has supplied them with, or we put the novel down and read something else; for human nature must be consistent with itself in fiction as well as in fact. Even in its madness there must be a method, so how could the will be free?
To pray for any personal boon or remission of evil—to bend the knee, or lift one's voice in praise or thanksgiving for any earthly good that had befallen one, either through inheritance, or chance, or one's own successful endeavor—was in my eyes simply futile; but, putting its futility aside, it was an act of servile presumption, of wheedling impertinence, not without suspicion of a lively sense of favors to come.
It seemed to me as though the Jews—a superstitious and business-like people, who know what they want and do not care how they get it—must have taught us to pray like that.
It was not the sweet, simple child innocently beseeching that to-morrow might be fine for its holiday, or that Santa Claus would be generous; it was the cunning trader, fawning, flattering, propitiating, bribing with fulsome, sycophantic praise (an insult in itself), as well as burnt-offerings, working for his own success here and hereafter, and his enemy's confounding.
It was the grovelling of the dog, without the dog's single-hearted love, stronger than even its fear or its sense of self-interest.
What an attitude for one whom God had made after His own image—even towards his Maker!