bandonment
of belief in a personal God. It is not, as has been pointed out a
hundred times, that morality in the abstract disappears, but the motive
and sanction are gone. There is nothing to raise it from the dead. Man's
attitude to it is left to himself. Grant that morals have their own base
in human life; grant that Nature has a Religion whose creed is Science;
there is yet nothing apart from God to save the world from moral Death.
Morality has the power to dictate but none to move. Nature directs but
cannot control. As was wisely expressed in one of many pregnant
utterances during a recent _Symposium_, "Though the decay of religion
may leave the institutes of morality intact, it drains off their inward
power. The devout faith of men expresses and measures the intensity of
their moral nature, and it cannot be lost without a remission of
enthusiasm, and under this low pressure, the successful reentrance of
importunate desires and clamorous passions which had been driven back.
To believe in an ever-living and perfect Mind, supreme over the
universe, is to invest moral distinctions with immensity and eternity,
and lift them from the provincial stage of human society to the
imperishable theater of all being. When planted thus in the very
substance of things, they justify and support the ideal estimates of
the conscience; they deepen every guilty shame; they guarantee every
righteous hope; and they help the will with a Divine casting-vote in
every balance of temptation."[62] That morality has a basis in human
society, that Nature has a Religion, surely makes the Death of the soul
when left to itself all the more appalling. It means that, between them,
Nature and morality provide all for virtue--except the Life to live it.

It is at this point accordingly that our subject comes into intimate
contact with Religion. The proposition that "to be carnally minded is
Death" even the moralist will assent to. But when it is further
announced that "the carnal mind is _enmity against God_" we find
ourselves in a different region. And when we find it also stated that
"the wages of _sin_ is Death," we are in the heart of the profoundest
questions of theology. What before was merely "enmity against society"
becomes "enmity against God;" and what was "vice" is "sin." The
conception of a God gives an altogether new color to worldliness and
vice. Worldliness it changes into heathenism, vice into blasphemy. The
carnal mind, the mind which i