Lecture I. Introduction. 9
imperfect, and therefore evil in his nature. Indeed, the cruelties
perpetrated by what we term nature have seemed to many so
contrary to the very elements of moral law, as to presuppose that
the power which permits and orders them is essentially immoral.
Zoroastrianism divided the world between a god of good and a
god of evil, and held that, under the present dispensation at all
events, the god of evil was, on the whole, the stronger power. [007]
It is strength rather than goodness that primitive man admires,
worships, and fears. In the struggle for existence, at any rate
in its earlier stages, physical strength plays the most important
part. The old instinctive pride of strength which enabled our first
ancestors to battle successfully against the forces of nature and
the beasts of the forest, still survives in the child and the boy.
The baby still delights to pull off the wings and legs of the fly
that has fallen into its power; and the hero of the playground
is the strongest athlete, and not the best scholar or the most
virtuous of schoolboys. A sudden outbreak of political fury like
that which characterised the French Revolution shows how thin
is the varnish of conventional morality which covers the passions
of civilised man, and Christian Europe still makes the battlefield
its court of final appeal. Like the lower animals, man is still
governed by the law which dooms the weaker to extinction or
decay, and gives the palm of victory to the strong. In spite of all
that moralists may say and preach, power and not morality still
governs the world.
We need not wonder, therefore, that in the earliest forms
of religion we find little or no traces of the moral element.
What we term morality was, in fact, a slow growth. It was
the necessary result of life in a community. As long as men
lived apart one from the other, there was little opportunity for
its display or evolution. But with the rise of a community came
also the development of a moral law. In its practical details,
doubtless, that law differed in many respects from the moral law
which we profess to obey to-day. It was only by slow degrees