But what is the difference between the scientific evolutionary view and the moral evolutionary view? If the scientific view is not in accord with the known facts, then it is not scientific. But if it is in harmony with the facts, what do we gain by rejecting it in preference to the "moral evolutionary view"? If on the other hand the "moral evolutionary view" is not scientific, what is its value?
According to the generally admitted scientific explanation, morality is just as much the result of evolution as is music or language. Morality is the slow product of the accumulated experience of humanity. But that does not seem to be Prof. Adler's theory. "There is," he says, "a voice that speaks in us out of the ultimate reality of things." But if this voice is not the inherited instincts of the race, what is it? If it is a ready-made, or made to order voice, or a voice not made at all—but, well, an unfathomable something commanding us in tones of the categorical imperative—who placed it there? God, or chance? If conscience, in straight words, is a natural product in the same sense that the brain or the human hand is, then there is no good reason for throwing a mystic veil over this one faculty or sense, or in decorating it with fallacy trimmings and jingling bells in order to make it look exceptionally awful and august. Just as the foolish overpraise of Jesus has nearly ruined him as a living force in the life of the world today, so there is danger of making an idol or a mummy out of morality by taking away all its beautiful naturalness.
"I simply think of the moral law within us," says Dr. Adler, "as a hand laid on us. * * * I like to think of the moral law * * * as of a hand; the face we do not see, but the hand we feel." Is not this an attempt to make ethics as mystifying as theology? If this "hand," of which the professor speaks, is endowed with unerring intelligence, how shall we account for the missteps, disastrous in their consequences, which man has taken with this "hand" laid on him?
However, this "hand" which we are told "is heavy upon our shoulders as Atlas," is not infallible, what is its worth? Is it necessary to perplex an audience with visions of a "hand," and "a face that belongs to the hand which we do not see," in order to impress it with the beauty and duty of obedience to the dictates of the enlightened and emancipated conscience?
But this confusion is the result of the commerce of Ethical Culture with Churchianity and Judaism, in other words, with the supernatural. A teacher who is trying to convince both Christian and Jew that without discarding their obsolete and obstructive dogmas they can join the Ethical Movement, is compelled by the very exigencies of the mesalliance to tarry in the region of fog and obscurity. And this confusion in thought, this lack of decision and clarity in one's concepts, this metaphysical vagueness and bewildering rhetoric is the price Orthodoxy exacts before it will bestow its smile upon a prodigal teacher seeking to return to the fold.
We could not agree with the head of the Ethical Movement that it was worth our while to try to win the favor of the churches, or to seek their co-operation. In our opinion such a rapprochement would only redound to the glory of an institution that has proven itself not only incapable of saving the world, but of positively hindering its salvation. This indictment is not voiced in haste, or in malice, but because it is based upon careful observation and study.
The church can never become a great moral power until it is rationalized. In this age of enlightenment the church can not be honest and Orthodox at the same time. We recommend this thought to the consideration of the Ethical lecturers. And no institution can make others honest, if it is dishonest itself. Is the church honest with science? Is it honest with history? Is it honest with the Bible? Mark these brave words of Huxley:
"When Sunday after Sunday, men who profess to be our instructors in righteousness, read out the statement that 'In six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that in them is,' in innumerable churches, they are either propagating what they may honestly know, and, therefore, are bound to know, to be falsities; or if they use the words in some non-natural sense, they fall below the moral standard of the much-abused Jesuit."
How refreshing!
To the average thinker the inconsistency of advocating Ethics as the supreme good, on the one hand, and on the other, of maintaining a deliberate silence on the demonstrably false teaching of the church which makes belief the greatest of all virtues, has only to be pointed out to be comprehended. And it is Kant, the patron-saint of the American Ethical lecturers, who set them the example of inconsistency. With a rigour which even in a dogmatist of the theological schools would be considered excessive, Emanuel Kant argued that so imperative was the duty to tell the truth that, even to save one's self or another from murder, there must be no departure from it. If you saw an assassin with a drawn dagger running after a man or a woman, and he asked you, "which way the fugitive ran," if you answer him at all, insists Kant, you must tell him the truth. And yet this same philosopher encouraged openly the Lutheran clergy of his day to go on deceiving the people with beliefs which they themselves had discarded, on the score that populus vult decipi, and that the clergy are excused by their profession for playing a false part.