Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/602

 588 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

the sacramental and sacerdotal means which the church pro- vided, all declined. The Renaissance tried to renew the Greek joy in life with art, pleasure, music, grace, social enjoyment, freedom, and luxury instead of asceticism, ritual, ecclesiasti- cism, rigid authority, distrust, and gloom. The religious wars greatly interfered with the programme of the Renaissance. They partly dispelled gaiety and grace. It was in the mores that the changes occurred. Churches fell to decay; monas- teries disappeared; chantries were suppressed; clergymen aban- doned their calling; pilgrimages, processions, retreats — all were neglected. Some lamented and protested; others applauded; the greatest number were indifferent. The attitude depended on the place and circumstances, above all upon commercial and industrial interests and upon intellectual attainments. The great fact was that faith in sacramentarianism as a philosophy of this life and the other was broken, and the mores which had been the outcome of that faith fell into neglect. The Counter- reformation arose from supposed effects of the church schism on the mores. The removal of the other world to a remoter place in human interest was a great change in religion. At its best, modern religion became a guide of life here, not a preparation for another life. Modern thought has been realistic and natural- istic, and the mores have all conformed to this world-philoso- phy. The other-worldliness has been ethical. It has been at war with the materialism of this world, a war which is in the mores, for we are largely under the dominion of those secondary or remoter dogmas deduced from grand conceptions of world- philosophy and inculcated as absolute authority. Our mores at the same time instinctively tend toward realistic and naturalis- tic views of life for which a new world-philosophy is growing up. Here we have the explanation of the gulf which is con- stantly widening between the "modern spirit" and the traditional religion. Some cling to the traditional religion in one or an- other of its forms which, after all, represent only the grades of departure from the mediaeval form toward complete har- mony with the modern mores. What the mores always represent is the struggle to live as well as possible under the condi-