Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/98

88 in this country that he is not accompanied by a clergyman, and he dies with the professions of piety and religious faith on his lips. Our penal institutions are filled with religious believers, and it is rare, in fact, that such men are not nominal members of churches, or at least have been at some time in their lives. I do not mention this fact to intimate that religious education or belief tends to promote immorality, for it does not; but rather to show that religious belief does not necessarily promote morality, no more than does the absence of such belief tend to promote immorality.

If a system of ethics and morality founded upon a purely human basis, and having no reference to any deity or future life whatever, is a religion, then Confucianism is a religion. But I do not know of any definition of the term that would include such a system.

The simple assertion, by those claiming authority on a subject that lies beyond the sphere of demonstration or proof one way or the other, has either to be accepted as a fact or repudiated as not proved. In the realm of religious dogmas it has been held to be good logic that when a proposition can not be disproved that it stands as proved. By this logic religions have been established. But in the matter of ethics the case is different. This comes within the scope of experience and demonstration, and is the outgrowth of experiment. There is no absolute standard of morality, what is construed as such being a relative condition, and regarded as good or bad, according to the state of civilization and educational standard by which actions are measured. What is regarded as perfect conduct in one age or under one environment may be rightly condemned under a higher development of the moral sense as a feeble attempt at morality.

What is called conscience can not be set up as a guide in the matter, for it is but the result of the mode of education. One man's conscience will approve of a given course, when another under a better social and political education will repudiate it as vicious. Among the lower orders of savages and uncivilized men there is apparently no moral standard observed. With the lower animal kingdom questions of priority and individual rights are settled, not by any tribunal in equity, but by the measure of physical strength. And what are considered the cardinal points in moral and ethical systems, as set forth in the decalogue of the Jews and in the corresponding codes of other ancient religions, are but the embodiment of the results of experience in the earlier developments of civilization When men first began to acquire property by industry or cunning, they found it inconvenient to have others appropriate the results of such thrift, and perhaps the first moral obligation recognized was the right to property;