Page:The Native Races of the Pacific States, volume 2.djvu/85

Rh claim civilization as the offspring of their religion. But religion and morality must not be confounded with civilization. All these and many other activities act and react on each other as proximate principles in the social organism, but they do not, any or all of them, constitute the life of the organism. Long before morality is religion, and long after morality religion sends the pious penitent to his knees. Religious culture is a great assistant to moral culture as intellectual training promotes the industrial arts, but morality is no more religion than is industry intellect. When Christianity, as in the early settlement of Mexico and Central America, falls into the hands of unprincipled adventurers or blind zealots who stand up in deadly antagonism to liberty, then Christianity is a drag upon civilization; and therefore we may conclude that in so far as Christianity grafts on its code of pure morality the principle of intellectual freedom, in so far is civilization promoted by Christianity, but when Christianity engenders persecution, civilization is retarded thereby.

Then Protestantism sets up a claim to the authorship of civilization, points to Spain and then to England, compares Italy and Switzerland, Catholic America and Puritan America, declares that the intellect can never attain superiority while under the dominion of the Church of Rome; in other words, that civilization is Protestantism. It is true that protestation against irrational dogmas, or any other action that tends toward the emancipation of the intellect, is a great step in advance; but religious belief has nothing whatever to do with intellectual culture. Religion from its very nature is beyond the limits of reason; it is emotional rather than intellectual, an instinct and not an acquisition. Between reason and religion lies a domain of common ground upon which both may meet and join hands, but beyond the boundaries of which neither may pass. The moment the intellect attempts to penetrate the domain of the Supernatural all intellectuality vanishes, and emotion and imagination fill its place.