Page:War and Other Essays.djvu/174

138 distinctive features of Christianity. The religion of Odin was a religion of warriors and for warriors. It took its tone from them and gave back the warrior spirit with a new sanction and an intensified ideal in this world and the other. Ferocity, bloodshed, and indifference to death were antecedents and consequents of the religion.

Sects of religion form upon a single idea or doctrine, which they always exaggerate. Then the dogma gets power over the whole life. This is the case in which the religion rises superior to the mores and molds them, as in the case of the Quakers. Some sects of India (the Jains) have put the prohibition against killing anything whatsoever which has life before everything else, and have drawn the extremest inferences from it as to what one ought to do and not do lest he kill anything. Their whole mode of life and code of duty is a consequence.

Within fifty years in the United States the mores have very powerfully influenced religion, and the effect is open to our view. The dogmatic side of religion has been laid aside by all the Protestant denominations. Many instances may be shown in which the mores have modified the religion. The attitude toward religion is in the mores; in recent mores open attacks on religion are frowned upon as bad manners and religion is treated with respect. The deism of the eighteenth century was an attack on religion, but the agnosticism of the nineteenth century, although irreligious, sought no war with religion. At the same time the interest in religion has very greatly diminished, and it is a symptom of indifference when men do not care to carry on controversies about it. The clergy has ceased to preach "theology." They and their congregations care for theology no longer; they look upon "morality" as the business of the clergy and the pulpit. The pulpit, as an institution, no longer