The Christian Church cannot be
held together as a great social force by his teaching or example as
a moral philosopher. A church organized on this theory speedily
becomes a lecture association or a philanthropic club, of about as
much aid to conduct as Freemasonry. Christ's sermons need the touch
of supernatural authority to make them impressive enough for the
work of social regeneration, and his life was too uneventful and the
society in which he lived too simple, to give his example real power
over the imagination of a modern man who regards him simply as a
social reformer.
This decline of faith in Christian dogma and history has not,
however, produced by any means a decline in religious sentiment, but
it has deprived religion of a good deal of its power as a means of
moral discipline. Moral discipline is acquired mainly by the
practice of doing what one does not like to do, under the influence
of mastering fear or hope. The conquest of one's self, of which
Christian moralists speak so much, is simply the acquisition of the
power of doing easily things to which one's natural inclinations
are opposed; and in this work the mass of mankind are powerfully
aided--indeed, we may say, have to be aided--by the prospect of
reward or punishment.
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