king out that moral misdeeds were offences against God,
but such arguments are not now required. The good and the well-being
of humanity is in itself sufficient argument. Humanitarianism is
taking the place of religion, and by so doing is demonstrating that
morality is, as it always has been, {237} independent of religion; and
that in truth religion has built upon it, not it upon religion. As
Hoeffding puts it (p. 328): "Religious faith ... assumes an independent
human ethic developed historically under the practical influence of the
ethical feeling of man." That is to say, morality is in Hoeffding's
view independent of religion, and prior to religion, both as a matter
of logic and of history. As a matter of history--of the history of
religion--this seems to me, for the reasons already given, to be
contrary to the facts as they are known. The real reason for
maintaining that morality is and must be--and must have
been--independent of religion, seems to me to be a philosophical
reason. I may give it in Hoeffding's own words: "What other aims and
qualities," he asks (p. 324), "could man attribute to his gods or
conceive as divine, but those which he has learnt from his own
experience to recognise as the highest?" The answer expected to the
question plainly is not merely that it is from experience that man
learns, but that man has no experience of God from which he could
learn. The answer given by Mr. Hobhouse, in the concluding words of
his _Morals in Evolution_ is that "the collective wisdom" of man "is
all that we directly know of the Divine." {238} Here, too, no direct
access to God is allowed to be possible to man. It is from his
experience of other men--perhaps even of himself and his own
doings--that man learns all he knows of God: but he has himself no
experience of God. Obviously, then, from this humanitarian point of
view, what a man goes through in his religious moments is not
experience, and we are mistaken if we imagine that it was experience;
it is only a misinterpretation of experience. It is on the supposition
that we are mistaken, on the assumption that we make a
misinterpretation, that the argument is built to prove that morality is
and must be independent of religion. Argument to show, or proof to
demonstrate, that we had not the experience, or, that we mistook
something else for it, is, of course, not forthcoming. But if we hold
fast to our conviction, we are told that we are fleeing "to th