tions. Ancient Egypt, Persia and India even
connected ethical principle and the future of the soul so closely, that
certain ethical laws were to determine one's fate in heaven or hell. This
led to the idea that this life is but the preparatory stage to the great
hereafter. But antiquity also witnessed more or less successful attempts
to emancipate ethics from religion. When the old beliefs no longer
satisfied the thinking mind and no longer kept men from corruption,
various philosophers attempted to provide general principles of morality
as substitutes for the departed deities. Confucius built up in China a
system of common-sense ethics based upon the communal life, but without
any religious ideals; this satisfied the commonplace attitude of that
country, but could not pass beyond the confines of the far East. A
semi-religious ascetic system was offered at about the same time by
Gautama Buddha of India, a prince garbed as a mendicant friar, who
preached the gospel of love and charity for all fellow creatures. His
leading maxims were blind resignation and self-effacement in the presence
of the ills, suffering and death which rule the entire domain of life. All
existence was evil to him, with its pleasure, passion and desire, its
thought and feeling; his aim was a state of apathy and listlessness,
_Nirvana_; while sympathy and compassion for fellow creatures were to
offer some relief to a life of delusion and despair. The Hindu conception
of the unbearable woe of the world corresponded more or less with the hot
climate, which renders the people indolent and apathetic. In striking
contrast to this was the vigorous manhood of the ethical systems developed
on the healthy soil of Greece, under the azure canopy of a sky that fills
the soul with beauty and joy. Life should be valued for the happiness it
offers to the individual or to society. The good should be loved for its
beauty, the just admired for its nobility. Greek ethics was thus both
aristocratic and utilitarian; it took no heed of the toiling slave, the
suffering poor, or the unprotected stranger. Both the Buddhist and the
Hellenic systems lacked the energizing force and motive of the highest
purpose of life, because both have left out of their purview the great
Ruler who summons man to his duty, saying: "I am the Lord thy God; thou
shalt and thou shalt not!"

4. Between the two extremes, the Hellenic self-expansion and the Buddhist
self-extinction, Jewish ethics labo