Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/830

 8l6 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

ments is better tactics than a direct assault on the volitions. The lodgment of a social ideal in the soul's inner citadel gives a steadier ascendency than assemblage, festival, public worship, or ceremony at stated occasions. An impression upon the judg- ment is worth more than an effervescent sentiment, such as is evoked by music. But moral precepts that seduce the judgment by masquerading as worldly wisdom may not always be relied on either. They bind a man in so far as his choices are ruled by rational considerations ; but plays and tales will never tire of showing the pet maxims of reasonable conduct swept aside by imperious instincts, passions, and emotions.

The best guarantee of a stable control from within is some- thing that will reach at once sentiment, reason, and will. Con- sequently a religion is widely effective for righteousness in so far as it is strong in these three directions. It should strike the chord of feeling, but not so exclusively as Quakerism, or Shinto, or the Religion of Humanity, or Neo-Catholicism. It should teach a day of reckoning, but not dwell on it so much as Islam or primitive Methodism. It should address the judgment, but not become so baldly rational as the English church in the time of Tillotson. The secret of the limited habitat of certain sects is found in a narrowness of appeal that restricts them to certain temperaments or certain social layers.

Simplicity of belief basis. Elements of conviction are, of course, associated with most forms of control. But when a type of restraint rests squarely on an unverifiable dogma, such as the Last Judgment, the Unseen Friend, or the Divine Fatherhood, it must be regarded askance, however transcendent its services. Either the dogma crumbles, and with it the restraint, leaving the last state of a man worse than the first ; or else the dogma obsti- nately kept as a moral fulcrum becomes a stumbling-block to enlightenment, a bar to progress, a shelter to superstition, and an offense to that intellectual honesty and sincerity which is one of the most precious instincts of the modern man. But of course dogmas differ vastly both in their value to morals and their harm to science.