Christianity has raised the world from barbarism to civilization.  Its influence has, in the course of centuries, abolished slavery, ennobled work, emancipated women, and revealed eternity.  But was it dogma that brought these blessings?  It is possible to avoid misunderstandings with regard to all subjects except those which transcend human conception, and these are the very subjects over which men have fought and desolated the world for the last eighteen hundred years, from the extermination of the Arians, on through the Thirty Years’ War, to the scaffold of the Inquisition, and what is the result of all this fighting?  The same differences of opinion as ever.

We may accept the doctrines of religion, as we accept the assurance of a trusty friend, without examination, but the kernel of all religions is the morality they teach, of which the Christian is the purest and most far-reaching.

And yet men speak slightingly of a barren morality, and place the form in which religion is presented before everything else.  I fear it is the pulpit zealot, who tries to persuade where he cannot convince, that empties the church with his sermons.

After all, why should not every pious prayer, whether addressed to Buddha, to Allah, or to Jehovah, be heard by the same God, beside whom there is none other?  Does not the mother hear her child’s petition in whatever language it lisps her name?

Reason is nowhere in conflict with morality, for the good is always finally identical with the rational; but whether our actions shall or shall not correspond with the good, reason cannot decide.  Here the ruling part of the soul is supreme, the soul which feels, acts, and wills.  To her alone, not to her two vassals, has God entrusted the two-edged sword of freewill, that gift which, as Scripture tells us, may be our salvation or our perdition.

But, more than this, a trusty councillor has been assigned us, who is independent of our wills, and bears credentials from God Himself.  Conscience is an incorruptible and infallible judge, whom, if we will, we may hear pronounce sentence every moment, and whose voice at last reaches even those who most obstinately refuse to listen.

The laws which human society has imposed upon itself can take account of actions only in their tribunals, and not of thoughts and feelings.  Even the various religions make different demands among the different peoples.  Here they require the Sunday to be kept holy, here the Saturday or Friday.  One allows pleasures which another forbids.  Even apart from these differences there is always a wide neutral ground between what is allowed and what is forbidden; and it is here that conscience, with her subtler discrimination, raises her voice.  She tells us that every day should be kept sacred to the Lord, that even permitted interest becomes unjust when exacted from the needy; in a word, she preaches morality in the bosom of Christian