o single moral teaching common to different
civilizations and different religions of an advanced stage of development
which we do not find to be eternally true. Let us try to study this view
of the case by the help of a few examples.

In early times, of course, men obeyed moral instruction through religious
motives. If asked why they thought it was wrong to perform certain actions
and right to perform others, they could have answered only that such was
ancestral custom and that the gods will it so. Not until we could
understand the laws governing the evolution of society could we understand
the reason of many ethical regulations. But now we can understand very
plainly that the will of the gods, as our ancestors might have termed it,
represents divine laws indeed, for the laws of ethical evolution are
certainly the unknown laws shaping all things--suns, worlds, and human
societies. All that opposes itself to the operation of those universal
laws is what we have been accustomed to call bad, and everything which
aids the operation of those laws is what we have been accustomed to think
of as good. The common crimes condemned by all religions, such as theft,
murder, adultery, bearing false witness, disloyalty, all these are
practices which directly interfere with the natural process of evolution;
and without understanding why, men have from the earliest times of real
civilisation united all their power to suppress them. I think that we need
not dwell upon the simple facts; they will at once suggest to you all that
is necessary to know. I shall select for illustration only one less
familiar topic, that of the ascetic ideal.

A great many things which in times of lesser knowledge we imagined to be
superstitious or useless, prove to-day on examination to have been of
immense value to mankind. Probably no superstition ever existed which did
not have some social value; and the most seemingly repulsive or cruel
sometimes turn out to have been the most precious. To choose one of these
for illustration, we must take one not confined to any particular
civilization or religion, but common to all human societies at a certain
period of their existence; and the ascetic ideal best fits our purpose.
From very early times, even from a time long preceding any civilization,
we find men acting under the idea that by depriving themselves of certain
pleasures and by subjecting themselves to certain pains they could please
the divine powers and t