which man has
inherited in the course of evolution as these find themselves in
various situations. Moral problems are meaningless apart from their
setting on this earth. Man is moral because he can pass judgments upon
courses of behavior and decide what best conduces to his welfare. He
is moral because he can build up standards of social and personal
conduct and adhere to them more or less completely. The assumption
that man is immoral is psychologically untrue. The asceticism and
pessimism of mediaeval Christianity was a reflection of false ideals and
of an unhealthy social system. There was an element of strain in the
demands held up before the individual. The spiritual life was a task
which he had to accomplish because it possessed a supernatural sanction.

But the inherent pessimism of much of Christianity was not its only
fault. It taught men to suppose that morality was not something which
paid for itself. So much did it stress the necessity of supernatural
sanctions that it led the majority to believe that no man would be good
unless he had to, unless he was afraid of the external consequences
which would be meted out to him at the bar of judgment. But how false
such a view is. We know to-day that morality pays here and now, in the
specie of a happy, healthy, well-developed life. Any other view makes
morality irrational and unnatural and, consequently, dependent upon
sanctions which rest upon the will of some agent apart from {176} this
concrete life of act and fact. To put this criticism in the technical
language of ethics, Christianity has tended to think of conduct in
terms of heteronomous ethics, _i.e._, in terms of precepts and laws
coming from outside of human life and pressed upon it by authority,
rather than in terms of autonomous ethics for which ideals and customs
are wise adjustments to the natural relations in which man finds
himself.

This assumption that morality is a hardship played into the hands of a
juridical notion of the sanctions of conduct, for which the conception
of immortality furnished the grandiose opportunity. The arm of society
is eluded at death, but death offers no escape for the wicked from the
outraged deity they have offended. It is the motive of fear which is
here employed. Human beings are to be scared into being good.
Morality is on the defensive because it has no real charm and natural
loveliness, because it does not grow out of a rational study of human
re