§3
The Receding God
I don't know that it is necessary to drag God into the argument. But if you like to regard God as the sanction and source of morality, or if you like to call the moral drift in human affairs God, it is possible to consider this "Sphere of Morality" from His point of view. His "point of view" is precisely what, in an instructive fable, we may present as the determining factor in morality. When He walked in the garden or lurked hardly distinguishable among the sticks and stones of the forest, morality was just an understanding between a man and his neighbour, a temporary agreement entered on by any two hunting savages whom He might happen to espy between the tree-trunks. When He dwelt among the peaks of Sinai or Olympus, the sphere of morality had extended to the whole tribe that occupied the subjacent valley. It came to include the nation, all the subjects of each sovereign state, by the time He had receded to some heavenly throne above the dark blue sky. And it is to be hoped that He may yet take a broader view, so that His survey will embrace the whole of mankind, if only we can banish Him to a remoter altitude in the frozen depths of space, whence He can contemplate human affairs without being near enough to interfere.
The moral of this little myth of the Receding God may be that the Sphere of Morality is extended in inverse proportion to the intensity of theological interference. Not that theology necessarily or always deliberately limits the domain of morality: but because the extension of moral relations and the relegation of anthropomorphic theology are co-ordinate steps in human advancement.
§ 4
The Philosopher looks at Society
The philosopher is apt to explain the growth and interrelation of ideas by tabulating them in an historical form, which may not be narrowly, chronologically, or "historically" true. The notion of the Social Contract may be philosophically true, though we are not to imagine the citizens of Rousseau's State coming together on a certain day to vote by show of hands, like the members of the Bognor Urban District Council. So we may illustrate a theory of moral or social evolution by a sort of historical pageant, which will not be journalistically exact, but will give a true picture of an ideal development, every scene of which can be paralleled by some actually known or inferred form of human life.