Page:War and Other Essays.djvu/171

Rh religion offers any bribes or concessions to human passion or weakness, the mores seize upon these and swell them into the vices of an age. If the Church sets rigid and arbitrary rules, it has to sell dispensations; why, then, should not the age become venal? If people revel in descriptions of torture and agony, they will be callous to it. If the religion presents sensual indulgence as a reward of good conduct, then sensuality is an ideal; it is licensed, not restricted. In primitive society all customs were sanctioned by ghosts. Hence all customs are ritual; hence abortion, infanticide, killing the old, cannibalism, and so on, were all ritual acts and not only were they proper, but within the prescribed conditions they were duties. When Christendom declared sex-renunciation to be the ideal of perfection for one-half of civilized men, and Mohammedanism presented sex-pleasure as the ideal for the other, a striking picture was presented of the two poles of excess and ill between which men are placed with respect to this great dominant interest of the race. All religions are creations of fantasy. They come out of the realm of metaphysics. They come down into this world of sense with authority. The moral ideas come out of the mores, which move, and they are used to criticise the religious traditions, which remain stereotyped. Religions enjoin acts which have become abominable in the mores, such as cannibalism, human sacrifice, child-sacrifice, prostitution, intoxication. They aim to supersede experience, knowledge, and reason by labors and injunctions. Galton says : "The religious instructor, in every creed, is one who makes it his profession to saturate his pupils with prejudice." Some obey, but the great mass of the society do, day by day, what will satisfy their interests according to the best knowledge they have or can get