al goodness which makes life happier and
fuller of activities and things worth while.

The traditional religion has not only been, frequently enough,
anti-social, but it has also been morally inefficient. Why? Because
it has made too much of tension and too little of intelligence.
Instead of pointing out that morality paid because it was only the
application {181} of intelligence to human needs, it set a standard of
moral discipline before people and then sought to drive them to its
attainment by sheer force of will and subjectively aroused emotion.
The modern ethical thinker is convinced that morality is but the
harmonious adjustment of an individual to his social group; it is the
sensible foresight which selects the active values which attract and
express man's nature.

This rather blind tension of traditional religion appears quite clearly
in the conception of sin. The setting of this idea has been monarchic
and terroristic. It has exhaled an atmosphere of sharp, mystic
contrasts which were as unreal as they were vicious. To set a goal too
high is almost as bad psychologically as to set it too low.
Christianity vaguely felt this flaw in its dramatic ethical scheme and
was led to bring the doctrine of God's saving grace to the front to
bridge the fearful gulf caused by the opposition of God's perfection to
man's imperfection. But the man of to-day who is sincere with himself
knows that this religious world-ethics is a meaningless fiction. He
can understand why it arose in the olden days, with its supernaturalism
and juridical ethics, yet he feels that this absolutism is a product of
monarchism and pre-evolutionary thinking. Goodness is a human ideal
whose content is always undergoing change, while it hovers just beyond
man's reach. I must confess, then, that I have little sympathy with
the gross exaggerations associated with this word sin. I know that I
often fall short of my better moral judgment and, at such moments of
moral insight, I experience a keen regret and try to strengthen those
tendencies and activities which will aid me to do better next time.
But I know too {182} much of personality on its biological,
psychological and social sides, too much of its complexity and its
foundations to retain the old notion of the self as an entity which,
having the ability to be godlike, chooses evil. Paul's God was an
oriental monarch; to the modern, he is a cad. Why, no sensible teacher
asks the impossible o