is the power
"which makes for righteousness." "As civil law," said Voltaire,
"enforces morality in public, so the use of religion is to compel it in
private life." "A complete morality," observes a contemporary Christian
writer, "meets all the practical ends of religion."[250-1] In such
expressions man's social relations, his duty to his neighbor, are taken
to exhaust religion. It is still the idea of the commonwealth, the
religion of morality, the submission to a law recognized as divine.
Whether the law is a code of ethics, the decision of a general council,
or the ten commandments, it is alike held to be written by the finger of
God, and imperative. Good works are the demands of such religion.

Catholicism, which is altogether theocratic and authoritative, which
pictures the church as an ideal commonwealth, has always most flourished
in those countries where the Roman colonies left their more important
traces. The reformation of Protestantism was a reversion to the ideal of
the individual, which was that of ancient Teutonic faith. In more recent
times Catholicism itself has modified the rigidity of its teachings in
favor of the religion of sentiment, as it has been called, inaugurated
by Chateaubriand, and which is that attractive form seen in the writings
of Madame Swetchine and the La Ferronnais. These elevated souls throw a
charm around the immolation of self, which the egotism of the Protestant
rarely matches.

Thus the ideal of the commonwealth is found in those creeds which give
prominence to law, to ethics, and to sentiment, the altruistic elements
of mind. It fails, because its authority is antagonistic to morality in
that it impedes the search for the true. Neither is morality religion,
for it deals with the relative, while religion should guide itself by
the absolute. Every great religious teacher has violated the morality of
his day. Even sentiment, attractive as it is, is no ground on which to
build a church. It is, at best, one of the lower emotional planes of
action. Love itself, which must be the kernel of every true religion, is
not in earthly relations an altruistic sentiment. The measure and the
source of all such love, is self-love. The creed which rejects this as
its corner stone will build in vain.

While, therefore, the advantages of organization and action are on the
side of the faiths which see in religion a form of government, they
present fewer momenta of religious thought than those which