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 440 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

definitely and dogmatically asserted the sinfulness of all destruc- tion of human life as a matter of amusement, or of simple convenience, and thereby formed a new standard higher than any which then existed in the world." 1 "This minute and scrupulous care for human life and human virtue in the humblest forms, in the slave, the gladiator, the savage, or the infant,. . . . is the distinguishing and transcendent characteristic of every society into which the spirit of Christianity has passed." a "The high conception that has been formed of the sanctity of human life, the protection of infancy, the elevation and final emancipa- tion of the slave classes, the suppression of barbarous games, the creation of a vast and multifarious organization of charity, and the education of the imagination by the Christian type, con- stitute together a movement of philanthropy which has never been paralleled or approached in the pagan world." 3

It would be a mistake to regard the spread of religion as the growing resort to a convenient instrument of social control. Law and the doctrine of future punishment, I have pointed out, are to be explained entirely in the light of their usefulness for regulation. But religion has independent roots. Even if it were not countenanced, furthered, and favored by society in recogni- tion of its services to social peace, it would perpetually renew itself in the hearts of men. For while sympathy is the offspring of the conviction of relationship, it is no less true that the con- viction of relationship is the offspring of sympathy. The unex- pected energy of fellow feeling at the time suggests to the reflective mind an ideal bond between ourselves and others. In the absence of a theory of the origin of the social sentiments, they cannot but seem to deny our visible separateness and to intimate an unseen relationship between men. A religious phi- losophy, therefore, tends perpetually to spring up afresh wher- ever there is a flow of warm human sympathy.

What now is the moral gain from the conviction that men stand to each other in a relation best described by the term, "brotherhood."

1 LECKY, History of European Morals, Vol. II, p. 20. * Ibid., p. 34. 3 Ibid., p. 100.