[19] The Moral Ideal, new and revised edition, p. 19.
[20] “Doubtless the ethical life of the world has suffered much from religion, but it owes to religion immeasurably more than it has suffered from it. Faulty enough indeed the influence has been, but the ethical life of the world has on the whole been greatly reënforced and purified by its religions.”—William Newton Clarke, The Christian Doctrine of God (1909), p. 13.
[21] “Morality is the endeavor to realize an ideal” (George Harris, Moral Evolution (1896), p. 54). Not to miss the import of this dictum emphasis must be laid on the word “endeavor”; for, in the words of Professor Green, morality must be regarded “as an effort, not an attainment” (Prolegomena to Ethics, 5th ed., p. 301).
[22] Meditations, tr. Long, xi, 18.
[23] “There is nothing more modern than the critical spirit which dwells upon the difference between the minds of men in one age and in another; which endeavors to make each age its own interpreter, and judge what it did or produced by a relative standard.”—James Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire, 8th ed., p. 261.
[24] Prolegomena to Ethics, 5th ed., p. 291.
[25] After long observation of the life of the uncivilized races of Polynesia, Alfred Russel Wallace records as his opinion that “savages act up to their simple code at least as well as we act up to ours” (The Malay Archipelago, vol. i, p. 139). “Many strange customs and laws obtain in Zululand, but there is no moral code in all the world more rigidly observed than that of the Zulus” (Russell Hastings Millward in National Geographic Magazine for March, 1909, p. 287).
[26] “The larger morality which embraces all mankind has its basis in habits of loyalty, love, and self-sacrifice which were originally formed and grew strong in the narrow circle of the family or the clan.”—W. Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites, 2d ed., p. 54.
[27] The Religion of the Semites, 2d ed., p. 274. Cf. Judges ix. 2; 2 Sam. v. 1.
[28] Dudley Kidd, Savage Childhood (1906), p. 74. See also Clifford, Lectures and Essays (1901), vol. ii, p. 79, on the “tribal self.”