This attitude of mind, which is still that of a large class, can be changed only by the reaffirmation by science of the assumptions and teachings of all the great world religions respecting the existence of a supersensuous world and a future life. It is therefore a matter of immeasurable import to morality that these assumptions of religion are coming to be regarded by an ever-growing number of scientists as well founded in reality. Psychical research has given a new trend to large sections of scientific speculation.[743] It is no longer crassly materialistic. It even assumes the existence of a supersensuous world. Thus at the conclusion of a careful survey of the evidence of man’s survival gathered by the English Society for Psychical Research, the distinguished physicist Sir Oliver Lodge writes: “The boundary between the two states—the known and the unknown—is still substantial, but it is wearing thin in places; and like excavators engaged in boring a tunnel from opposite ends, amid the roar of water and other noises, we are beginning to hear now and again the strokes of the pickaxes of our comrades on the other side.”[744]
Incontrovertible proof of man’s survival after bodily death would mark the opening of a new era in the moral life of humanity; for, in the minds of many, “ethics can be rendered ethical only on the assumption that there is a reality deeper than the phenomenal world of sense, truer than the world we know and better.”[745] It was doubtless a conviction that the future of both religion and morality is in large measure dependent upon a firm belief in a future life which led William Ewart Gladstone to say of psychical research that it is “the most important work which is being done in the world—by far the most important.” Indisputably, the reaction of another world lying clear and distinct in the light of science beyond the frontiers of earth would give new meaning to life and a fresh impulse to the moral progress of the race. The effect upon the moral life of the modern world would be not less profound than that produced upon the moral life of the ancient world by the incoming of Christianity with its glad affirmation of a life beyond the tomb.
4. The Ethics of Theology
The progressive moralization of the idea of God
In an admirable chapter entitled “Ethics and Theology” the author of Moral Evolution, after noting how religious ideas and beliefs exert an influence on moral ideas and conduct, remarks: “Now we are to observe that moral ideals have, in their turn, modified and clarified doctrine, or, in other words, that there has been an ethical development of theology, and that contempt of creed is really the substitution of a moral for an immoral or a nonmoral theology.”[746] The same truth is expressed by Newman Smyth in these words: “Reformations have grown out of the ethical protest of the Christian mind against inherited dogmas. Old theology is always becoming new in the vitalizing influence of ethics.”[747]
As a result of the growth and refinement of the moral feelings, there has been going on in wide circles in Western Christendom just such a change in men’s conception of the character of God as marked the best Hebrew thought during the later centuries of the history of the people of Israel. The idea of God inherited by the modern from the medieval age was an incongruous blending of ideas derived from three different sources. There was, first, the crude archaic notion of deity derived from the Old Testament records of what conduct in his chosen people Yahweh approved; second, the dogmas of Augustinian theology respecting imputed sin, election, everlasting punishment, and other supposed principles of the divine government; and third, conceptions wholly inconsistent with these drawn from the New Testament narratives of the life and teachings of the Prophet of Nazareth.
Gradually, through the growth of the moral feelings, this conception of the divine character has been purged of its grosser, archaic, and immoral elements. The early Hebrew ideas have been rejected as the immature and unworthy notions of deity of a race still on a low plane of religious development; the Calvinistic idea of God has become “the supreme incredibility”; while the Gospel teaching of deity has been received by the instructed reason and conscience as the only credible ideal of the divine.[748]
Since, as we have repeatedly had brought to our attention, religious ideas exert a profound influence on moral ideas and on conduct, this moralization of the conception of the divine character has deep significance for the progressive purification and refinement of the moral life of man.
The moralization of the conception of future punishment
Closely connected with these changes in men’s idea of God, indeed forming a part of that conception, are the changes which have taken place in their ideas of the divine government in the hereafter.