but the
economist deals with things as they are, not as they ought to be. Moral
science even is not a preaching agency, desirous of dividing with the
clergy the ethical guidance of the people. When men pit science against
religion, they usually refer to its superior power of explaining
reality. And if it be objected that therefore no morally educative
agency would remain if religion were discarded, the answer is simple. A
system of moral idealism founded on science--it is absurd to call it
science--does exist, and might at any time be enlarged to the
proportions of a national or international educative agency. As yet it
is left to individual cultivation or crystallised in a few tiny
associations, such as Ethical and Secularist and, partly, Socialist
Societies; and I venture to say, from a large experience of these
bodies, that, apart from the professed peace societies, they have been
more assiduous than any religious associations in England, in proportion
to their work, in demanding the substitution of arbitration for war, and
that the overwhelming majority, almost the entirety, of their members
are pacifists. To speak of this small organised force, with its slender
influence, as equally discredited with the far mightier and
thousand-year-older influence of the Churches would be strangely
incongruous; and it is hardly less incongruous to drag science into the
comparison.

A somewhat similar distinction must be observed in regard to
civilisation. The antithesis of religion and civilisation is confused
and confusing. Christian ministers have claimed that _they_ are the
moral element of civilisation, and they have jealously combated every
effort to take from them or divide with them that function. They resist
every attempt to exclude their almost useless Bible-lessons from our
schools, and to substitute for them a direct and more practical moral
education of children. They have for fifteen hundred years claimed and
possessed the monopoly of ethical culture in European civilisation, and
we are a little puzzled when they turn round and say, with an air of
argument, that if Christianity has failed civilisation also has failed.
There is only one civilisation in Europe that has attempted to
substitute a humanitarian for a religious training of conduct; one
nation that is plainly and overwhelmingly non-Christian. That nation is
France. And France has one of the best moral records in modern Europe,
and has behaved nobly througho