629 See Schmidt, The Prophet of Nazareth (1905), p. 322.

630 “L’humanité cherche l’idéal; mais elle veut que l’idéal soit une personne; elle n’aime pas une abstraction.”—Renan, Marc-Aurèle, 5^me ed., p. 582.

631 History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. ii, p. 8.

632 On this subject consult Hatch, The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church (1888), lect. xii, “The Transformation of the Basis of Christian Union: Doctrine in the Place of Conduct.”

633 “After the middle of the third century, ... Christianity may be just as truly called a Hellenic religion as an Oriental.”—Harnack, The Expansion of Christianity (1904), vol. i, pp. 393 f.

634 The change of emphasis from moral life to correct doctrine took place during the last half of the second and the first half of the third century. “Under the influence of contemporary Greek thought, the word faith came to be transferred from simple trust in God to mean the acceptance of a series of propositions, and these propositions, propositions in abstract metaphysics” (Hatch, The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church (1888), p. 310).

635 The Athanasian Creed, which by the end of the ninth century was in use in the churches of the West as an authoritative symbol and exposition of the Roman Catholic faith, says, “Whosoever will be saved, before all things, it is necessary that he hold the Catholic faith, which faith, except every one who do keep entire and unviolated, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly” (Philip Schaff, Bibliotheca Symbolica Ecclesiae Universalis, vol. ii, p. 66).

636 Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. ii, p. 68.

637 “The virtues of the intellect, freedom and boldness of thought and the power to doubt, the vital principle of scientific research, are, in the eyes of primitive Christianity, worthless and dangerous.”—Paulsen, A System of Ethics, tr. Thilly (1906), p. 68.

638 Cf. Harnack, The Expansion of Christianity (1904), vol. i, chap. v, “The Religion of Authority and Reason.”

639 See Paulsen, System of Ethics, tr. Thilly (1906), bk. i, chap. iii.

640 The ascetic movement was a reaction not only against the moral dissoluteness of pagan society, but also against the moral degeneracy which, before the end of the third century, had set in within the Christian community itself. The Church had become to a lamentable degree conformed unto the world, and had lost much of that moral fervor which characterized it during the first two centuries.

641 Alban Butler, The Lives of the Saints (the Fathers, Martyrs, and other Principal Saints, compiled from monuments and other authentic sources), 12 vols. (1854). Orig. ed. pub. 1754–1760.

642 “If you do any good beyond what is commanded by God, you will gain for yourself more abundant glory, and will be more honored by God than you would otherwise be,” was the teaching of the Church respecting the meritoriousness of ascetic practices. Cf. Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics (1892), p. 313.

643 The “Dialogue” is of course a purely literary creation of some monk. Oisin was not a contemporary of St. Patrick.

644 J. H. Simpson, Poems of Oisin (1857), pp. 42 ff. We have reproduced only a small part of the poem.

645 History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. ii, p. 34.

646 Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1908), vol. ii, p. 252.

647 Cf. Dante, Inf. xiii.

648 See above, pp. 175, 215.

649 Ireland was foremost in this missionary movement because she was so given over to the monastic spirit. See Montalembert, The Monks of the West (1861), vol. ii, p. 397.

650 According to Westermarck (The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), vol. i, pp. 565–569) charity took the place of sacrifice in the primitive cults, and for this reason became such a prominent religious duty in all the higher faiths.

651 Montalembert, The Monks of the West (1861), vol. i, pp. 397 f.

652 Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. ii, pp. 86 ff.

653 The Moral Ideal, 3d ed., p. 369.

654 See above, p. 245.

655 “The suppression of all religions but one by Theodosius, the murder of Hypatia by the monks of Cyril, and the closing by Justinian of the schools of Athens, are the three events which mark the decisive overthrow of intellectual freedom.”—Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 428.

656 See above, p. 6.

657 Physics and Politics (1873), pp. 70 f.

658 “One may find ... the chief characteristic of the period of the migrations in a complete uprooting of public morality, a universal overturning of inherited conceptions of right and wrong.”—Francke, Social Forces in German Literature, 2d ed., p. 12.

659 Parliament of Religions (1893), vol. i, pp. 574 f.; consult also Bryce, Studies in History and Jurisprudence (1901), vol. ii, p. 237.

660 Qur’ân, tr. Palmer (Sacred Books of the East, vols. vi, ix), suras ii. 184–189, 212–215; iv. 90; viii. 40; ix. 5–14, 29; xlvii. 4, and many others.

661 Ibid. suras ii. 149; iii. 151; ix. 113.

662 Sura xxiv. 33. The New Testament nowhere inculcates the manumission of slaves, but the spirit of its teachings is opposed to slavery, and the early Fathers of the Church encouraged the emancipation of slaves.

663 Sura iv. 3.

664 Suras vi. 138, 141, 152; xvii. 33.

665 Suras ii. 216; v. 93.

666 R. Bosworth Smith, Mohammed and Mohammedanism (1875), p. 204.

667 Ameer Ali, The Spirit of Islam, 2d ed., p. 283.

668 According to the principles of the Koran, though no Moslem captive might be reduced to servitude, all non-Moslem prisoners could, as spoils of war, be enslaved: “We make lawful for ye ... what thy right hand possesses [slaves] out of the booty God has granted thee” (sura xxxiii. 49).

669 “The recognition of the slave traffic by Mohammedanism has been, and is to this day, a curse to Africa and a source of disturbance to the world’s politics.”—Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution (1906), vol. i, p. 307.

670 In an address. Cf. R. Bosworth Smith, Mohammed and Mohammedanism (1875), pp. 59 ff.

671 Ameer Ali, The Spirit of Islam, 2d ed., p. 328. The author maintains that Mohammed himself did not intend that his rules should be binding for all time.

672 This teaching is one which does not show itself as a generally recognized principle in the pre-Christian centuries, as does the principle of love, or self-devotion to the common good, or universal benevolence. “Christianity at its inception did not take over this moral principle, ready-made, from any of the older cults or cultures from which the Christian movement was in a position to draw. It is not found, at least in appreciable force, in the received Judaism; nor can it be derived from the classical (Greco-Roman) cultures, which had none of it” (Thorstein B. Veblen, “Christian Morals and the Competitive System,” The International Journal of Ethics for January, 1910).

673 “Christian mores in the Western Empire were formed by syncretism of Jewish and pagan mores. Christian mores therefore contain war, slavery, concubinage, demonism, and base amusements, together with some abstract ascetic doctrines with which these things are inconsistent.”—Sumner, Folkways (1907), p. 116.

674 For opinions of early Christian writers and the attitude of the Church on the soldier’s profession and the rightfulness of war, see Grotius, Rights of War and Peace, tr. Whewell, pp. 49 ff.

675 Harnack, The Expansion of Christianity (1904), vol. ii, p. 205.

676 See above, p. 277.

677 Throughout the medieval ages and down almost to our own day these Old Testament records, misread, were used to justify many of the cruelties of war, and other atrocities:

678 Lecky believes this to have been the main cause of the transformation in the Church. “The transition,” he says, “from the almost Quaker tenets of the primitive Church to the essentially military Christianity of the Crusades was due chiefly ... to the terror and the example of Mohammedanism” (History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. ii, p. 252). But, as we have seen, the transition was already nearly complete before the rise of Islam.

679 In a portrayal of the character of the Scandinavians, the Church historian Schaff observes: “Their only enthusiasm was the feeling of duty; but the direction which had been given to this feeling was so absolutely opposed to that pointed out by the Christian morality, that no reconciliation was possible” (History of the Christian Church, vol. iv, p. 110). Yet in the important domain of ethics which we are here examining this is exactly what did happen.

680 History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. ii, p. 253.

681 Josiah Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty (1908).

682 “So great, it is said, was the knights’ respect for an oath, a promise, or a vow, that when they lay under any of these restrictions, they appeared everywhere with little chains attached to their arms or habits to show all the world they were slaves to their word; nor were these chains taken off till their promise had been performed, which sometimes extended to a term of four or five years. It cannot be expected, of course, that reality should have always come up to the ideal.”—Westermarck, The Origin and Development of Moral Ideas (1908), vol. ii, p. 102.

683 History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. ii, p. 272.

684 First printed in 1873, from MSS. compiled probably as early as the twelfth or thirteenth century. There is an English translation by Charles Swan (1877).

685 “There can be little doubt,” says Lecky, “that the Catholic reverence for the Virgin has done much to elevate and purify the ideal of woman and soften the manners of men” (History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. ii, p. 367). And so Professor Nathaniel Schmidt: “The chivalry of the medieval knight from which our modern treatment of woman so largely is derived cannot be regarded as solely a product of Christianity, for it has a deep root in the dreamy reverence for woman characteristic of our pagan ancestors. Yet it would not have become what it was but for the veneration accorded to the Virgin Mary” (The Prophet of Nazareth (1905), p. 324).

686 See Curtis M. Geer, The Beginning of the Peace Movement (1912).

687 Kluckhohn, Geschichte des Gottesfriedens (1857), p. 38.

688 This part of the week was chosen because these days had been consecrated by Christ’s passion, burial, resurrection, and ascension.

689 Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution (1906), vol. i, p. 314.

690 The last instance of an arrangement for ransom of prisoners was an agreement between England and France in 1780. See Hall, International Law, 5th ed., p. 414, n. 1.

691 One center of these reform movements was the celebrated French monastery of Cluny. The influences which radiated from the cloisters of this convent had a profound effect for centuries upon the moral life of Christendom.

692 See Sabatier, Life of St. Francis of Assisi.

693 History of the Inquisition (1887), vol. i, p. 266.

694 “There was need of the exaggeration of self-sacrifice taught by Francis to recall humanity to a sense of its obligations.... The value of such an ideal on an age hard and cruel can scarce be exaggerated” (Lea, History of the Inquisition (1887), vol. i, pp. 260 f.). See also Nathaniel Schmidt, The Prophet of Nazareth (1905), p. 325.

695 See above, p. 262.

696 “Ethics on the basis of authority becomes a mere legal casuistry.”—Hall, The History of Ethics within Organized Christianity (1910), pp. 296, 326.

697 “But meanwhile by alternations of Hebraism and Hellenism, of a man’s intellectual and moral impulses, of the effort to see things as they really are, and the effort to win peace by self-conquest, the human spirit proceeds; and each of these two forces has its appointed hours of culmination and seasons of rule.”—Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1875), p. 143.

698 It must be borne in mind that the spirit of the Renaissance was at work long before the Renaissance.

699 In this there is substantial agreement among historians of the Inquisition: consult Lea, The Inquisition of the Middle Ages (1887), vol. i, pp. 236 ff.; Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, pp. 98, 395 f.; Pollock, Essays in Jurisprudence and Ethics (1882), essay vi, “The Theory of Persecution”; Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. viii, article on “Inquisition.”

700 “The case for theological persecution is unanswerable if we admit the fundamental supposition that one faith is known to be true and necessary for salvation.”—Pollock, Essays in Jurisprudence and Ethics (1882), p. 155.

701 Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. viii, under “Inquisition.”

702 Besides the doctrine of the criminality of misbelief, Lecky finds a secondary cause of Christian persecution in the medieval teaching respecting hell. That vision of the awful and eternal torments prepared for misbelievers, he says, “chilled and deadened the sympathies and predisposed men to inflict suffering” (Rationalism in Europe, new ed. (1890), vol. i, p. 347).

703 Lea, History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages (1887), vol. i, p. 234. “The representatives of the Church were children of their own age.... Theologians and canonists, the highest and the saintliest, stood by the code of their day and sought to explain and justify it” (Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. viii, under “Inquisition”).

704 “It was strange that one almost swooning with pain should have said the gentlest-hearted and truest thing about human nature that has ever been said since the world began.”—Gerald Stanley Lee, “Business, Goodness, and Imagination,” Hibbert Journal for April, 1912, p. 651.

705 On Machiavellism see The Prince, and introductions to different editions by Macaulay, Lord Acton, and Henry Morley; Figgis, Studies of Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius (1907), pp. 81–107; John Morley, Machiavelli (Romanes Lecture for 1897).

706 It should be borne in mind that in Machiavelli’s age politics had been secularized, that is, divorced from theology, and this with the approval of most men. Machiavelli would now go farther and separate politics and morality. This is Lord Morley’s interpretation of The Prince. He thinks we shall best understand Machiavelli, yet without for a moment approving his teaching, “if we take him as following up the divorce of politics from theology, by a divorce from ethics also. He was laying down certain maxims of government as an art; the end of that art is the security and permanence of the ruling power; and the fundamental principle from which he silently started, without shadow of doubt or misgiving as to its soundness, was that the application of moral standards to this business is as little to the point as it would be in the navigation of a ship. The effect was fatal even for his own purpose, for what he put aside, whether for the sake of argument or because he thought them in substance irrelevant, were nothing less than the living forces by which societies subsist and governments are strong” (Machiavelli, Romanes Lecture for 1897).

707 “Catherine de Medici, Philip II, Alva, Des Adrets, Tilly, Wallenstein were simply incarnations of the Machiavellian theories which ruled this period.”—Andrew D. White, Seven Great Statesmen (1910), pp. 86 f.

708 Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (1903), p. 22.

709 Ibid. p. 25.

710 Special emphasis was laid upon this virtue of courtesy in the ideal of courtliness. And rightly so, for, as has been well said, “To be courteous is just as much a duty as to be honest, for rudeness rouses more hatred and bitterness than good honest cheating.”

711 In many lives of this period there was a combination of the ideal of the courtier and that of the monk. There is a fine portrayal of such a character in Shorthouse’s John Inglesant.

712 See above, p. 276.

713 The best authority on this subject is Lea, Superstition and Force, 4th ed., pp. 101–247.

714 See above, p. 304.

715 The last judicial duel in England was fought in 1492, but the practice was not abrogated in Russia till 1649.

716 Ralph Barton Perry, The Moral Economy (1909), p. 34. And so Thomas Cuming Hall: “The glory of Protestant ethics as founded by Luther and developed by Kant is the autonomous, democratic, unpriestly character stamped upon it” (History of Ethics within Organized Christianity (1910), p. 527).

717 Culture and Anarchy (1875), p. 145.

718 History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. ii, p. 370.

719 See below, p. 362.

720 On this subject see Andrew D. White, Seven Great Statesmen (1910), chapter on Thomasius.

721 S. Alexander, Moral Order and Progress (1889), p. 391.

722 History of Rationalism in Europe (1890), vol. ii, p. 220.

723 History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 126.

724 The Approach to the Social Question (1909), p. 84.

725 Muirhead, The Elements of Ethics (1909), p. 232.

726 An Essay on Crimes and Punishments, tr. Voltaire (1793), p. 157.

727 See Sisson, “The State absorbing the Functions of the Church,” International Journal of Ethics for April, 1907, p. 341.

728 “It won’t do any longer to lay the blame for poverty wholly upon its victims. These cruel theories cannot face a growing suspicion that poverty is somehow involved in the ethics of distribution.”—Louis F. Post, in address; see The Public for June 21, 1912, p. 593.

729 Lloyd, Man the Social Creator (1906), p. 135.

730 The most practicable proposal for the undoing of this ancient and ever-augmenting wrong of private monopoly in land is that presented with singular force and clarity by Henry George in his epochal work, Progress and Poverty. His proposal is to exempt from taxation industry and all forms of property save land, and to lay upon land values, or, in other words, upon actual or potential ground rents, a tax that would reclaim practically the whole of these for society, and secure to the public all future increments in land values created by communal growth and enterprise. Since this tax is to take the place of all other forms of taxation it has become known as “the single tax.” Such a change in the tax system would inevitably create a hardship in a few cases, but a hardship almost infinitesimal as compared with that now inflicted upon the many by the preëmption of the earth by a class. The reform would undoubtedly, as claimed by its advocates, destroy private monopoly in land, the root which nourishes most other monopolies, and secure to all equal right of access to the earth and its resources.

731 Dewey and Tufts, Ethics (1908), p. 162.

732 See Ira Woods Howerth, “Competition, Natural and Industrial,” The International Journal of Ethics for July, 1912.

733 “We may fairly ask whether there is a single moral question of any magnitude which intelligent and educated men would answer to-day in precisely the same fashion as they would have done before the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species” (Taylor, The Problem of Conduct (1901), pp. 57 f.). See also Huxley, Evolution and Ethics (1899). Huxley maintains that the “cosmic process” is nonethical and in direct opposition to the ethical evolution going on in human society.

734 “The best is wanting when selfishness begins to be deficient” (“The Twilight of the Gods,” The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Alexander Tille, vol. xi, p. 191). “The weak and ill-constituted shall perish.... What is more injurious than any crime? Practical sympathy for all the ill-constituted and weak—Christianity” (“The Antichrist,” ibid. vol. xi, p. 238). This way of thinking and talking is by no means exclusively modern. Callicles, in Plato’s Gorgias, says to Socrates: “And therefore this seeking to have more than the many is conventionally said to be shameful and unjust, and is called injustice, whereas nature herself intimates that it is just for the better to have more than the worse, the more powerful than the weaker; and in many ways, among men as well as among animals, and indeed among whole cities and races, that justice consists in the superior ruling over and having more than the inferior” (Jowett’s Dialogues of Plato, vol. iii, p. 72).

735 See Kropotkin, Mutual Aid.

736 “The animal species in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress” (Kropotkin, Mutual Aid (1909), p. 293). See also Bixby, The Crisis in Morals (1891), p. 235.

737 See Dewey, “Is Nature Good,” Hibbert Journal for July, 1909.

738 “‘Ye have compassion on one another’: this struck me much: Allah might have made you having no compassion on one another,—how had it been then? This is a great direct thought, a glance at first hand into the very fact of things” (Carlyle, Heroes and Hero Worship, “The Hero as Prophet”). The Gâthas have the same thought: “Who, O Great Creator! is the inspirer of the good thoughts (within our souls)? Who ... hath made the son revering the father?” (Yasna xliv. 4, 7, Sacred Books of the East, vol. xxxi).

739 “In the new way of looking at things, which came to the world from Darwin, there is hope and cheer, if we but take the matter aright. Only consider what his doctrine of the shaping power of environment is leading us to do in bettering the conditions of the poor, the defective, the prone to crime. His demonstration that circumstances may make or break a man, is a clarion call to humanitarian zeal. And his teaching of the infinite variability of species, and of the indefinite progress which man may make in the cultivation of humane and moral qualities, is one that looks distinctly to the perfectibility of the race.”—The New York Nation for January 7, 1909, p. 7.

740 On this subject see Evans, Evolutional Ethics and Animal Psychology (1898).

741 When in 1654 matches for cockfighting were forbidden in England the reason for the prohibition was not that it was cruel to the birds, but for the reason that the matches were “commonly accompanied with gaming, drinking, swearing, quarreling, and other dissolute practices” (Pike, A History of Crime in England (1873), vol. ii, p. 186). Consult further, Lecky, Rationalism in Europe (1890), vol. i, pp. 307 f.

742 Evolutional Ethics and Animal Psychology (1898), p. 18. Darwinism has without doubt also aided the vegetarians in their crusade against the use of animal flesh for food, and in conjunction with the influence of Eastern ideas and convictions may cause ultimately a great change in the ethical feelings of the Western peoples respecting this practice. They may come to regard it with the same deep moral reprobation as is now felt by Eastern moralists. “For my part,” says the Japanese writer Nitobé, “the surprising thing is that European ethics can be so atavistic as to stoop to a sort of cannibalism” (Fifty Years of New Japan (1909), vol. ii, p. 462).