eligious
movement. Mere morality can never lead us to concern ourselves with the
future of the race, and in the days of old, men used to protest against
the tendency to subordinate the interests of religion to the claims of
"mere morality." There was a sound natural instinct underlying that
protest, so often and so vigorously made by Christianity, and again
revived to-day in a more intelligent form. The claim of the race is the
claim of religion. We have to beware lest we subordinate that claim to our
moralities. Moralities are, indeed, an inevitable part of our social order
from which we cannot escape; every community must have its _mores_. But we
are not entitled to make a fetich of our morality, sacrificing to it the
highest interests entrusted to us. The nations which have done so have
already signed their own death-warrant.[425] From this point of view, the
whole of Christianity, rightly considered, with its profound conviction of
the necessity for forethought and preparation for the life hereafter, has
been a preparation for eugenics, a schoolmaster to discipline within us a
higher ideal than itself taught, and we cannot therefore be surprised at
the solidity of the basis on which eugenical conceptions of life are
developing.

The most distinguished pioneers of the new movement of devotion
to the creation of the race seem independently to have realized
its religious character. This attitude is equally marked in Ellen
Key and Francis Galton. In her _Century of the Child_ (English
translation, 1909), Ellen Key entirely identifies herself with
the eugenic movement. "It is only a question of time," she
elsewhere writes (_Ueber Liebe und Ehe_, p. 445), "when the
attitude of society towards a sexual union will depend not on the
form of the union, but on the value of the children created. Men
and women will then devote the same religious earnestness to the
psychic and physical perfectioning of this sexual task as
Christians have devoted to the salvation of their souls."

Sir Francis Galton, writing a few years later, but without doubt
independently, in 1905, on "Restrictions in Marriage," and
"Eugenics as a Factor in Religion" (_Sociological Papers_ of the
Sociological Society, vol. ii, pp. 13, 53), remarks: "Religious
precepts, founded on the ethics and practice of older days,
require to be reinterpreted, to make them conform to the needs of
p