We have seen that religion and morality marched together as long as the evolution of the society was healthy and natural. Often there was a struggle over the ritual and mythical elements in religious morality; but, as a rule, the civic type of morality gained the upper hand. Religious sanctions were called in because of the faith in divine powers interested in the welfare of the community, but these sanctions soon ceased to be creative. While the gods remained, these sanctions would necessarily remain; yet they tended to become benevolent and secondary.
But Christianity, by reason of the forces at work at the time of its origin, nourished vicious interpretations of morality. The despair of human nature which we note in the writings of St. Paul tinged the outlook of Christian ethics. Man is by nature evil; only the working in his soul of a supernatural grace can lead him to value the things which are pure and of good { 175} repute. This pessimism cannot be too sharply spurned. Man is neither angel nor devil; he is just man. And the modern thinker is pretty well convinced that morality is a purely human affair growing out of the instinctive tendencies which man has inherited in the course of evolution as these find themselves in various situations. Moral problems are meaningless apart from their setting on this earth. Man is moral because he can pass judgments upon courses of behavior and decide what best conduces to his welfare. He is moral because he can build up standards of social and personal conduct and adhere to them more or less completely. The assumption that man is immoral is psychologically untrue. The asceticism and pessimism of mediæval Christianity was a reflection of false ideals and of an unhealthy social system. There was an element of strain in the demands held up before the individual. The spiritual life was a task which he had to accomplish because it possessed a supernatural sanction.
But the inherent pessimism of much of Christianity was not its only fault. It taught men to suppose that morality was not something which paid for itself. So much did it stress the necessity of supernatural sanctions that it led the majority to believe that no man would be good unless he had to, unless he was afraid of the external consequences which would be meted out to him at the bar of judgment. But how false such a view is. We know to-day that morality pays here and now, in the specie of a happy, healthy, well-developed life. Any other view makes morality irrational and unnatural and, consequently, dependent upon sanctions which rest upon the will of some agent apart from { 176} this concrete life of act and fact. To put this criticism in the technical language of ethics, Christianity has tended to think of conduct in terms of heteronomous ethics, _i.e._, in terms of precepts and laws coming from outside of human life and pressed upon it by authority, rather than in terms of autonomous ethics for which ideals and customs are wise adjustments to the natural relations in which man finds himself.