Lecture I. Introduction. 11
of the Church. In the eyes of the Creator, the correct statement
of abstruse metaphysical questions was supposed to be of more
importance than the fulfilment of the moral law.
The first step in the work of bringing religion and morality
together was to place morality under the sanction of religion.
The rules of conduct which the experiences of social life had
rendered necessary or advantageous were enforced by an appeal
to the terrors of religious belief. Practices which sinned against
the code of social morality were put under the ban of the gods
and their ministers, and those who ventured to adopt them were
doomed to destruction in this world and the next. Thetapu,
which was originally confined to reserving certain places and
objects for the use of the divine powers, was invoked for the
protection of ethical laws, or to punish violations of them, and
the curse of heaven was called down not only upon the enemy
of the tribe, but upon the enemy of the moral code of the tribe as
well.
Religion thus became tribal as well as personal; the religious
instinct in the individual clothed itself with the forms of social
life, and the religious conceptions which had gathered round the
life of the family were modified and transferred to the life of the
community. It was no longer only a feeling of fear or reverence
on the part of the individual which made him bow down before
the terrors of the supernatural and obey its behests; to this were
now added all the ties and associations connected with the life
of a tribe. The ethical element was joined to the religious, and
what has been termed the religious instinct or consciousness in
the individual man attached itself to the rules and laws of ethical
conduct. But the attachment was, in the first instance, more
or less accidental; long ages had to pass before the place of [010]
the two elements, the ethical and religious, was reversed, and
the religious sanction of the ethical code was exchanged for an
ethical sanction of religion. It needed centuries of training before
a Christian poet could declare:“He can't be wrong whose life is