lf spontaneously. It is a natural and prompt
expression of the fact that our life is social: our acts have the
closest relation to others besides ourselves. Now and again, perhaps, a
man is tempted to assert his own personality, or seek his own
gratification, in such a way as to ignore his fellows; but he is usually
arrested before long by the simple experience that he himself suffers
from the actions of others just as they may suffer from his conduct. It
is a lesson of life which one needs no power of analysis to learn.

And the chief reason why the abandonment of the old doctrines is
proceeding without any moral degeneration is that this experience was
really always the basis of general morality. We need not question--it
would be absurd to question--that refined natures have received moral
aid from their belief in the presence of God, or in a desire to please
God by accepting the law of virtue as a declaration of his will; though
we must be equally candid in admitting that men and women of this nature
have not been observed to deteriorate when they sacrifice their
religious beliefs, as thousands of them have done. On the other hand, we
will hardly question that numbers of people of coarser nature have been
deterred from evil-doing by dread of supernatural punishment. It is,
however, notorious in the moral history of Europe that these religious
beliefs have been consistent with a vast amount of transgression of the
decalogue: more than we witness in any civilised country in our own
time. How, then, are we to discover what were the real springs of
conduct in the mass of ordinarily decent people? It seems to me that the
only accurate method is to avoid theories and consider people in the
flesh. Do our Christian friends--did we ourselves in Christian
days--refrain from lying, dishonesty, injustice, cruelty, and injury,
solely or mainly because God forbids them or will punish them? I have
not met the man, except in the imaginative pages of religious
controversy, who confessed that he would stoop freely to these things if
there were no Christian prohibition. The mainspring of ordinary decent
conduct in any educated community has always been a perception of its
human and social value.

The only line of the decalogue about which there is likely to be any
dispute in this regard is that putting restraint on sexual relations. I
have not to consider here a subject so remote from my immediate
interest, and will observe only that