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Title: Morality as a Religion
An exposition of some first principles

Author: W. R. Washington Sullivan

Release Date: July 30, 2007 [EBook #22177]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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MORALITY AS A RELIGION

AN EXPOSITION OF SOME FIRST PRINCIPLES

BY

W. R. WASHINGTON SULLIVAN

"Religion is Morality recognised as a Divine command."
--IMMANUEL KANT

"The mind of this age has fallen away from theology to
morals. I conceive it an advance."
--EMERSON

LONDON

SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO., LIM.

NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN CO.

1898

[_All rights reserved_]

PREFACE.

A recent work by M. Guyau was originally announced under the title of
_The Non-Religion of the Future_, and, doubtless, an impression is
generally prevalent that, with the modification or disappearance of
traditional forms of Belief, the fate of Religion itself is involved.

The present volume is a plea for a reconsideration of the Religious
question, and an inquiry as to the possibility of reconstructing
Religion by shifting its basis from inscrutable dogmas to the
unquestionable facts of man's moral nature. It is now some fifty years
since Emerson wrote that "the progress of Religion is steadily towards
its identification with Morals," and foretold "a new Church founded on
Moral Science . . . the Church of men to come". It is more than a
century since the immortal Immanuel Kant startled Europe by the
betrayal of the immensity of the emotion whereby the contemplation of
"man's sense of law" filled his soul, shedding henceforth an unfading
glory about the ideal of Duty and Virtue, and elevating it in the
strictest sense to the supreme height of Religion. What these men--the
prophet and philosopher of the New Idealism--thought and did has borne
fruit in the foundation in America, Great Britain and Ireland, in
France, Germany, Austria and Italy, of Centres or Societies of Ethical
Culture which assume as axiomatic that there is, there can be, n