eal,'
'thou shalt speak the truth,' 'thou shalt love thy parents,' 'thou shalt
fear God.' What more does he want?

But whence comes this common inheritance or stock of moral ideas? Their
beginning, like all other beginnings of human things, is obscure, and
is the least important part of them. Imagine, if you will, that Society
originated in the herding of brutes, in their parental instincts, in
their rude attempts at self-preservation:--Man is not man in that he
resembles, but in that he differs from them. We must pass into another
cycle of existence, before we can discover in him by any evidence
accessible to us even the germs of our moral ideas. In the history of
the world, which viewed from within is the history of the human mind,
they have been slowly created by religion, by poetry, by law, having
their foundation in the natural affections and in the necessity of some
degree of truth and justice in a social state; they have been deepened
and enlarged by the efforts of great thinkers who have idealized and
connected them--by the lives of saints and prophets who have taught and
exemplified them. The schools of ancient philosophy which seem so far
from us--Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Epicureans, and
a few modern teachers, such as Kant and Bentham, have each of them
supplied 'moments' of thought to the world. The life of Christ has
embodied a divine love, wisdom, patience, reasonableness. For his image,
however imperfectly handed down to us, the modern world has received a
standard more perfect in idea than the societies of ancient times, but
also further removed from practice. For there is certainly a greater
interval between the theory and practice of Christians than between the
theory and practice of the Greeks and Romans; the ideal is more above
us, and the aspiration after good has often lent a strange power to
evil. And sometimes, as at the Reformation, or French Revolution, when
the upper classes of a so-called Christian country have become corrupted
by priestcraft, by casuistry, by licentiousness, by despotism, the lower
have risen up and re-asserted the natural sense of religion and right.

We may further remark that our moral ideas, as the world grows older,
perhaps as we grow older ourselves, unless they have been undermined in
us by false philosophy or the practice of mental analysis, or
infected by the corruption of society or by some moral disorder in
the individual, are constantly assumin