SOURCE: "Religion versus Morality According to the Elder Henry James," in The International Journal of Ethics, Vol. XLII, No. 3, April, 1932, pp. 289-303.

Perry was an American philosopher and biographer whose two-volume biography of William James won the Pulitzer Prize for that genre in 1935. In the excerpt below, he argues that James, Sr., was an antinomian, or one who believes that under the gospel dispensation of grace the moral law is of no use because faith alone is necessary to salvation.

Morality and religion are related in many ways. For example, each may be taken as the sanction of the other—belief in God as a foundation for morality, or the moral law as a proof of God. These aspects of the question I omit altogether. The point to which I wish to direct attention is the relation between the moral life and the religious life. In some sense...