f in God and immortality? Are love of father and
mother on the part of children, affection and serviceableness between
brothers and sisters, straight-forwardness and truthfulness between
business men, essentially dependent upon these beliefs? What sort of
person would be the father who would announce divine punishment or
reward in order to obtain the love and respect of his children? And if
there are business men preserved from unrighteousness by the fear of
future punishment, they are far more numerous who are deterred by the
threat of human law. Most of them would take their chances with heaven a
hundred times before they would once with society, or perchance with the
imperative voice of humanity heard in the conscience." (_Leuba._)

The primary motive of moral standards and practices is man's desire to
seek happiness and avoid pain. And so it is not strange that morality
has become stronger as the power of religion has weakened. "Right
through history it has been the social instincts that have acted as a
corrective to religious extravagances. And it is worth noting that with
the exception of a little gain from the practice of casuistry, religions
have contributed nothing towards the building up of a science of ethics.
On the contrary, it has been a very potent cause of confusion and
obstruction. Fictitious vices and virtues have been created and the real
moral problems lost sight of. It gave the world the morality of the
prison cell, instead of the tonic of the rational life. And it was
indeed fortunate for the race that conduct was not ultimately dependent
upon a mass of teachings that had their origin in the brains of savages,
and were brought to maturity during the darkest period of European
civilization.... And we know that the period during which the influence
of Christian theism was strongest, was the period when the intellectual
life of civilized man was at its lowest, morality at its weakest, and
the general outlook hopeless. Religious control gave us heresy hunts,
Jew hunts, burning for witchcraft, and magic in place of medicine. It
gave us the Inquisition and the _auto da fe_, the fires of Smithfield,
and the night of St. Bartholomew. It gave us the war of sects, and it
helped powerfully to establish the sect of war. It gave us life without
happiness, and death cloaked with terror. The Christian record is before
us, and it is such that every Church blames the others for its
existence. Quite as certainly we c