'voice of God.' Religious history and biography are
full of avowals, on the one hand, of the murderous clash of convictions
alike resting on 'revelation' of all kinds, and, on the other hand, of
the agonies of zealots 'wrestling in prayer' to know what is really the
divine will.[5] Cromwell's life illustrates both orders of dilemma, with
a sufficiency of resultant moral evil to arrest propaganda on the side
of faith. And the philosopher of the 'categorical imperative' miscarries
as instructively as does the soldier of divine will. Kant, on the one
hand, vetoes even the telling of a lie to a would-be murderer to put him
astray, and, on the other hand, commends to 'enlightened' clergymen the
systematic preaching of their religion in a double sense, because
_populus vult decipi_. The 'categorical imperative,' as propounded by
him, is a form of self-deception.

When, again, the psychic facts are critically faced and the 'categorical
imperative' is rationally recognised as either the sum of the persisting
moral judgments or the mere verbalism that we ought to do what we feel
we ought to do, the rationalist is still at no disadvantage, utilitarian
or other. It is not there that his tether tightens. Religious morality,
as finally ratified by the more thoughtful among religious men, is but
the endorsement of 'natural' morality. There is not one social
commandment, as distinguished from religious or ritualist dogma, that
did not emerge as a prescription of the natural moral sense, primitive
or otherwise--a supererogatory proof that the religious prescriptions
are from the same source. All surviving religious ethic is to-day
actually accredited as such, precisely because--and only in so far
as--it conforms to natural judgment. Without resort to that tribunal,
the religionist could not discriminate between the sanction of the sixth
commandment and the law of the levirate, which he has cancelled.

The religious sanction, therefore, is logically null, in terms of the
religious man's own mental processes.[6] There is left him, to discredit
the rationalist, only the threat that the God whom he terms infinitely
good will or may punish the unbeliever for not believing on the strength
of a Bible packed with incredible narrative and indefensible doctrine.
The anti-rationalist position is thus reduced to 'Pascal's wager'--at
once the most childish and, from the standpoint of other and nobler
religious thought, the most irreligious argument