base amusements, together with
some abstract ascetic doctrines with which these things are
inconsistent. The strain of the mores towards consistency produced
elimination of some of these customs. The church embraced in its fold
Latin, Teutonic, Greek, and Slavonic nations, and it produced a grand
syncretism of their mores, while it favored those which were Latin. The
Teutonic mores suffered elimination. Those which were Greek and
Slavonic were saved by the division of the church. Those which now pass
for Christian in western Europe are the result of the syncretism of two
thousand years. When now western Christians come in contact with
heathen, Mohammedans, Buddhists, or alien forms of Christianity, they
endeavor to put an end to polygamy, slavery, infanticide, idolatry,
etc., which have been extruded from western Christian mores. In Egypt at
the present time the political power and economic prosperity of the
English causes the Mohammedans to envy, emulate, and imitate them in all
those peculiarities which are supposed to be causes of their success.
Hence we hear of movements to educate children, change the status of
women, and otherwise modify traditional mores. It is another case of the
operation by which inferior mores are rendered obsolete.

+121. The art of societal administration.+ It is not to be inferred that
reform and correction are hopeless. Inasmuch as the mores are a
phenomenon of the society and not of the state, and inasmuch as the
machinery of administration belongs to the state and not to the society,
the administration of the mores presents peculiar difficulties. Strictly
speaking, there is no administration of the mores, or it is left to
voluntary organs acting by moral suasion. The state administration fails
if it tries to deal with the mores, because it goes out of its province.
The voluntary organs which try to administer the mores (literature,
moral teachers, schools, churches, etc.) have no set method and no
persistent effort. They very often make great errors in their methods.
In regard to divorce, for instance, it is idle to set up stringent rules
in an ecclesiastical body, and to try to establish them by extravagant
and false interpretation of the Bible, hoping in that way to lead
opinion; but the observation and consideration of cases which occur
affect opinion and form convictions. The statesman and social
philosopher can act with such influences, sum up the forces which make
them, and great