all
naturalistic Ethics is to make a God of public opinion. And if no
other deity were recognized, such a God would assuredly not be without
worshippers. And yet the strongest temptation to most of us is the
temptation to follow a debased public opinion--the opinion of our age,
our class, our party. Apart from faith in a perfectly righteous God
whose commands are, however imperfectly, revealed in the individual
Conscience, we can find no really valid reason why the individual
should act on his own sense of what is intrinsically right, even when
he finds himself an 'Athanasius contra mundum,' and when his own
personal likings and inclinations {76} and interests are on the side of
the world. Kant was at bottom right, though perhaps he did not give
the strongest reasons for his position, in making the idea of God a
postulate of Morality.

From a more directly practical point of view I need hardly point out
how much easier it is to feel towards the moral law the reverence that
we ought to feel when we believe that that law is embodied in a
personal Will. Not only is religious Morality not opposed to the idea
of duty for duty's sake: it is speculatively the only reasonable basis
of it; practically and emotionally the great safeguard of it. And
whatever may be thought of the possibility of a speculative defence of
such an idea without Theism, the practical difficulty of teaching
it--especially to children, uneducated and unreflective persons--seems
to be quite insuperable.[3] In more than one country in which
religious education has been banished from the primary schools, grave
observers complain that the idea of Duty seems to be suffering an
eclipse in the minds of the rising {77} generation; some of them add
that in those lands crime is steadily on the increase. Catechisms of
civil duty and the like have not hitherto proved very satisfactory
substitutes for the old teaching about the fear of God. Would that it
were more frequently remembered on both sides of our educational
squabbles that the supreme object of all religious education should be
to instil into children's minds in the closest possible connexion the
twin ideas of God and of Duty!

(2) I have tried to show that the ethical importance of the idea of God
is prior to and independent of any belief in the idea of future rewards
and punishments or of a future life, however conceived of. But when
the idea of a righteous God has once been accepted, the idea