We are told in his Table Talk, that the great Luther was accustomed to say that God’s way of making man was very foolish ("sehr naerrisch"), and that if God had deigned to take him into His counsel he would have strongly advised Him to make the whole human race, as He made Adam, “out of earth.”  And certainly if applied to the careless and reckless manner in which procreation in Luther’s day, as still for the most part in our own, was usually carried out there was sound common sense in the Reformer’s remarks.  If that is the way procreation is to be carried on, it would be better to create and mould every human being afresh out of the earth; in that way we could at all events eliminate evil heredity.  It was, however, unjust to place the responsibility on God.  It is men and women who breed the people that make the world good or bad.  They seek to put the evils of society on to something outside themselves.  They see how large a proportion of human beings are defective, ill-conditioned, anti-social, incapable of leading a whole and beautiful human life.  In old theological language it was often said that such were “children of the Devil,” and Luther himself was often ready enough to attribute the evil of the world to the direct interposition of the Devil.  Yet these ill-conditioned people who clog the wheels of society are, after all, in reality the children of Man.  The only Devil whom we can justly invoke in this matter is Man.

The command “Be fruitful and multiply,” which the ancient Hebrews put into the mouth of their tribal God, was, as Crackanthorpe points out,[424] a command supposed to have been uttered when there were only eight persons in the world.  If the time should ever again occur when the inhabitants of the world could be counted on one’s fingers, such an injunction, as Crackanthorpe truly observes, would again be reasonable.  But we have to remember that to-day humanity has spawned itself over the world in hundreds and even thousands of millions of creatures, a large proportion of whom, as is but too obvious, ought never to have been born at all, and the voice of Jehovah is now making itself heard through the leaders of mankind in a very different sense.

It is not surprising that as this fact tends to become generally recognized, the question of the procreation of the race should gain a new significance, and even tend to take on the character of a new religious movement.  Mere morality can never lead us to concern ourselves with the future of the race, and in the days of old, men used to protest against the tendency to subordinate the interests of religion to the claims of “mere morality.”  There was a sound natural instinct underlying that protest, so often and so vigorously made by Christianity, and again revived to-day in a more intelligent form.  The claim of the race is the claim of religion.  We have to beware lest we subordinate that claim to our moralities.  Moralities are, indeed, an inevitable part of our social