Page:The Necessity of Atheism (Brooks).djvu/198

196 were made to sanction these "virtues. God or no God, immortality or no immortality, the essential morality of man would have been what it is." (J. H. Leuba: "Belief in God and Immortality")

The best that is in man is generated in the experiences of his daily life. The attributing of moral qualities to the gods was a much later development in the evolution of the moral ideas. At this stage of our development man is fortified by a sense of human fellowship, and in practice, as well as in theory, has long since given up the assumption that he needed superhuman beliefs. He has fully recognized the independence of morality from superhuman beliefs.

James Mill and J. S. Mill taught the greatest happiness of the greatest number as the supreme object of action and the basis of .morality. And it was this conception that introduced the new ethical principles of duty to posterity. This conception is a much nobler one than the religious interpretation of morality to consist in mainly defining what man's duty to God is; a morality whose chief selfish inspiration is not the helping of one's fellowmen but the saving of one's own soul. A secular morality teaches that what man thinks, says, and does lives after him and influences for good or ill future generations. This is a higher, nobler, and greater, incentive to righteousness than any life of personal reward or fear of punishment in a future life. There are today a rapidly growing number of eminent moral teachers who condemn the clinging to the belief of personal existence after death as a hindrance to the best life on earth. Professor J. H. Leuba, in his work, "The Belief in God and Immortality" concludes that, "These facts and considerations indicate. that the reality of the belief in immortality to civilized nations is much more limited than is commonly supposed; and that, if we bring into calculation