Is it then from policy or from principle that the Ethical lecturers, starting as they did, by denouncing the supernatural as the destroyer of character, later on came to ignore altogether the existence even of degrading superstitions, and were content to be a moral improvement association merely, somewhat after the pattern, as Marie-Jean Guyau states, of a Christian Temperance Society? *
* L'Irréligion de L'Avenir.
The battle of progress is to be fought in the mind. An intellectual awakening must precede all real and permanent moral improvement of the world. On the tree of enlightenment alone can ripen the fruit of righteousness and peace. And there can be no enlightenment under the church. Even as the light of the sun can not enter a dungeon, the light of knowledge can not penetrate the mind which it has been the aim of the church to keep shut. The condition of the spread of knowledge as of the sunlight is the same—freedom. Yet freedom is anathema where there is a Revelation. A thousand Ethical Societies could not help Russia unless she began by striking, without sparing or wavering, at the teachings of the Greek church.
The new edifice cannot rise side by side with the old—it must rise on the ruins of the old.
Can there be any real moral advance in a community in which the following is accepted and taught as a divinely revealed truth: "We are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by faith, and not for our own works and deservings. Wherefore, that we are justified by faith only is a most wholesome doctrine, and very full of comfort." *
* No. XI. of the Articles of the Church of England. All the
other Christian churches teach to young and old the same
doctrine.
Only by self-stultification can an Ethical Society refrain from combating so injurious a teaching with all the earnestness and courage at their command.
Nothing would please the priests and rabbis more than to be assured that the efforts of the new teachers will be confined strictly to giving moral exhortations, and that they will leave church and dogma respectfully alone.