Religion and Morality: Their Nature and Mutual Relations, Historically and Doctrinally Considered.

Abstract

The object of this book is to maintain the thesis that there can be no morality without religion. Mr. Fox holds, indeed, that the basis of morality is intuitive, and he devotes a chapter to setting forth the nature and standard of morals as he conceives them. Morality, he thinks, is a kind of harmony between the agent and the universe, and the rightness or wrongness of an act is to be determined by its relation to the universal order. Reason, he says, considers the nature of the act in question in its various relations, and, if it perceives that to preserve the adjustment of conduct to the universal order such an action is necessary, it pronounces the moral judgment-this act is to be performed. If, on the contrary, it perceives that an action is out of harmony with that order, it dictates that the act is wrong (p. i68). I cannot see that such a theory differs essentially from that of the evolutionists, who maintain that right conduct consists in the adjustment of the individual to his environment; but I will not dwell on that point, as Mr. Fox's object is not to set forth a theory of morals, but to prove that morality cannot exist without a religious sanction. His views are set forth with clearness and fulness, and a few quotations will show what they are. He affirms that all the attempts of philosophers to construct an ethical system independent of religion are failures, and that it is utterly impossible that any valid system of ethics can be constructed by human ingenuity, without recognizing the existence of God as the Author of the universe and of the moral order (p. I58). Mr. Fox does not hold, however, that the moral law is an arbitrary decree of the Creator, but expressly repudiates that view, and blames the opponents of Christianity for attributing such a doctrine to the Christian church. His own view is that the moral law is the expression, in the nature of the human mind and of the entire universe, of the eternal law of righteousness necessarily existent in the Deity (P. 30i). This latter view is undoubtedly the more philosophical as well as the more satisfying to the moral sense of man; yet the other doctrine, that the moral law is a divine command, is certainly held by the majority of Christians, and is, moreover, the doctrine of the Bible. But Mr. Fox's main contention is that, without God and a future life of rewards and punishments, there is no adequate motive to good conduct. This point is insisted on in repeated passages of which the following will suffice. Without the recognition that the universal order is the expression of the Divine Will, to which the individual is obliged to conform his