we have to learn is that the power of the soul must be
enforced. And that can only come by laying hold upon God. The power
that ever lay behind human progress, that worked out law and order and
security, has in all ages been the power of religion--of God. But
religion has been in our day a matter of contempt. It was merely a
'grotesque, fungoid growth which clustered round the primeval thread of
ancestor worship,' more or less a 'pathological phenomenon closely
allied with neurosis and hysteria.' There are few things more pitiful
in human weakness {176} than the contempt expressed by the scientist
and the learned for that power of the soul which created the
civilisation of which the contemners are the fine fruit!

Though religion has been contemned, yet it cannot be denied that those
forces which create abiding races and powerful empires are the very
forces which have never been found to exist apart from the sanctions of
religion. The development of the Roman Empire was profoundly
influenced by its religion. To religion virtue owed its power, and
from it patriotism drew its inspiration. And that religion claimed a
supernatural origin--the source of its might was in the Unseen. When
religion became a matter of public ridicule and the gods an 'object of
secret contempt among the polished and enlightened,' and the
philosophers 'concealed the sentiments of an atheist under their
sacerdotal robes,' then the restraints of morality were flung aside and
Rome went headlong to ruin. It was the same in Greece; {177} the same
everywhere. All religions have issued their commands: 'And God spake
all these words, saying...' And so long as men felt the supernatural
behind the mandate, they trembled and obeyed; when behind the mandate
they discerned only superstition, they surrendered to their base
desires. Morality can only be based on the Divine. Its commands are
operative when these commands are recognised as those of the Moral
Governor of the universe. If these commands do not affect issues
beyond the grave, if they have no sanction in the eternal order, then
there is no value in obeying them, and no crime in disregarding them.
Rather is there a merit in flouting them--the mere products of
ignorance and superstition. To despise them and disregard them was the
mark of an emancipated and superior mind! Thus it ever came that first
the supernatural vanished and afterwards morality vanished. And thus
has it been also