beautiful. His elders and friends may indeed take upon themselves the responsibility of enlightening his choice. But the assumption is that nothing but enlightenment is necessary. To judge that this or that is good is as a matter of course to choose it.

It is true that the conservative Greek morality was cast in the form of reverence for the gods and obedience to the law of the state. But the Greek gods were hardly adapted to the rôle of moral authorities. Apart from the scandalous stories told about them, which Plato properly deplores, they seem to lack the necessary authoritative relation. They are authorities, it would seem, only in the sense in which today wealth and fashion are authorities in matters of taste and social convention. They may interfere in human affairs, if they care to do so, because they have the power, but it is not clear that their power rests upon any special basis of right.

The Kantian conception of morality reflects a totally different tradition, the tradition, namely, of protestant Christianity, which is mainly an Old Testament tradition, thus a Hebrew tradition. Kant, we remember, was bred in the atmosphere of German protestantism and German pietism. Now in the Old Testament God is Jahveh, or Jehovah, the tribal god of the Hebrews, and as the tribal god he is in some sense the father of the tribe. But the idea of fatherhood embodies two motifs. The father may be expected to forgive offences against himself, such as one in another relation will never forgive. On the other hand the father is especially authorized to punish. How deeply instinctive is this conception, both parents and teachers can testify. The parent who does not hesitate to punish severely is often fiercely jealous of punishment by another,

and the child will take meekly from his parent what he would resent from the teacher. It may be said, then, that both the Old Testament and the New Testament teach the fatherhood of God. But while in the New Testament God is the tender parent, in the Old Testament he is the stern parent. The New Testament teaches God's mercy, the Old Testament asserts his authority.

But the tribal god was something more than a father to his tribe, in the customary human sense. The human father begets his children, but he does not create them; he is not infrequently surprised by what he has begotten. In the Hebrew cosmology God was both the father and creator of man, and likewise the creator of the world. This meant that the authority of God was absolute, and further that God was the sole and final source of any authority to be found in the universe. The logic of the conception is very simple: shall I not do what I will with my own? And what is so truly and certainly my own as that which I have created? That this is the true logic of property would be conceded, I believe, both by communists and by individualists; whose point of difference regarding property would then lie in the question of who has created it. But it seems that no human being does more than partially create. Even the novelist who creates characters is dismayed to find them taking courses of their own. God, however, is the absolute creator. And therefore he has absolute authority.

Such I take to be the final "basis of authority" underlying, however obscurely, every authoritarian theory of morality, not excepting those which are avowedly agnostic or atheistic; underlying likewise every authoritarian theory

of the state. In the mediaeval tradition, persisting well into modern times, morality was based squarely upon the will of God, all right was divine right, and all earthly authority was a question of to whom God had delegated authority. The doctrine of the divine right of kings, which came to a head in seventeenth-century England, was a reply to the divine right of popes. It fell before the divine right of the people-for the rights of the people had to be no less divinely authenticated than the rights of kings. The eighteenth-century "rights of man" were still to come. It seemed out of the question to establish any human relations without erecting a "seat of authority", which was always God's authority. Thus we find divine right asserted quite as despotically in Puritan New England as in England herself under Charles the First.

§ 16

So long as the morality of authority implied the background of a theocratic universe, with God as the creator and father, it stood for an idea, and for a genuinely moral idea, even if, as I shall point out later, the idea failed to warrant authority. Under the growing influence of rationalism the theocratic conception lost its power and the authority of church and king declined. But the demand for authority survived—as it survives to this day. It was now, however, no longer an idea but a tradition.

In morals the seat of authority was now said to be, not external, but internal. The quality of authority was bestowed upon our perceptions of good and bad. The "moral sense" was defined and set apart, secure from criticism, from our sense of other things. And Bishop Butler set up

the authority of "conscience". As Butler would have it,2 the deliverances of conscience are in no sense my personal judgments, either reasoned or instinctive, of the goodness or badness of things. Conscience, like the "daimon" of Socrates, is "the voice of God", speaking within me and compelling me to do blindly what on my own judgment I should hardly choose to do. The tradition of authority survives today, somewhat attenuated and disguised, among the moralists who hold that the word "ought" expresses something unique and per se unanalysable, and among the political philosophers who find a similar unanalysable in the conception of "sovereignty". The implication is that these conceptions proceed from a power other and higher than ourselves. The authoritarian tradition survives under the seemingly most adverse theoretical conditions in the moral idea seductively described as "self-realization”; which, following T. H. Green, warns you that your only "real self" will be that which chooses a "common good", expressing in the end the will of God.

Modern science has parted with the will of God. It is the special claim of science that she brings us down out of the clouds of empty abstraction, romantic imagination, and futile longing (which the Freudians have shown to be "infantile") to the ground of solid and tangible values. For the mysticism of the divine will science substitutes the realities of human welfare. And this gospel is often announced, in tones that remind one of Lucretius, as a glad emancipation from religious superstition.

One might then expect that, here at least, the tone of

2 As a matter of fact, Butler's analysis of "conscience" is really an analysis, so modern in some respects that he more than anticipates T. H. Green, of the process of reflection; and it is interesting to note that, while Butler's sermons were written to oppose Shaftesbury, both moralists made the essence of morality to consist in reflective action-and both used the term "reflection".

authority would give way to gentle persuasiveness and sweet reasonableness. But not at all. The "orthodoxy" of today is as often scientific as religious. This scientific view of the world has merely appropriated the panoply of authority after destroying the person of the Author. The scientific sociologist proclaims the sacred authority of Society in tones that recall the ancient law of Sinai. The modern judge endeavors to awe the condemned criminal by explaining that he is sentenced for an offence against Society. The majesty of the law, which was formerly the majesty of God, is now (since the law cannot dispense with majesty) the majesty of the Social Order. And this conception of the sacredness of the group as against the individual is re-echoed down to the gangs of boys on the street-corner. A college Greek-letter fraternity in expelling a recalcitrant member (who may have been too intelligent to take his fraternity seriously) conceives that it thereby places upon him a moral stigma.

The scientific biologist then fortifies the authority of society by explaining that in the struggle for existence the solidarity of the species is all-important. His special authority is therefore the authority of the Laws of Nature, and for the majesty of God he substitutes the majesty of the Species. His lead is followed by the scientific anthropologist, who discovers in the solidarity of the species the origin and ground of the belief in God and now proposes to reconcile science and religion by demonstrating the solid usefulness of religion.

It was very interesting during the World War to observe all the more ardent militarists rallying quietly to the cause of religion. Omitting those whose thoughts were turned to serious things by the horror of the situation, perhaps by