order from which we cannot escape; every community must have its mores.  But we are not entitled to make a fetich of our morality, sacrificing to it the highest interests entrusted to us.  The nations which have done so have already signed their own death-warrant.[425] From this point of view, the whole of Christianity, rightly considered, with its profound conviction of the necessity for forethought and preparation for the life hereafter, has been a preparation for eugenics, a schoolmaster to discipline within us a higher ideal than itself taught, and we cannot therefore be surprised at the solidity of the basis on which eugenical conceptions of life are developing.

The most distinguished pioneers of the new movement of devotion to the creation of the race seem independently to have realized its religious character.  This attitude is equally marked in Ellen Key and Francis Galton.  In her Century of the Child (English translation, 1909), Ellen Key entirely identifies herself with the eugenic movement.  “It is only a question of time,” she elsewhere writes (Ueber Liebe und Ehe, p. 445), “when the attitude of society towards a sexual union will depend not on the form of the union, but on the value of the children created.  Men and women will then devote the same religious earnestness to the psychic and physical perfectioning of this sexual task as Christians have devoted to the salvation of their souls.”

Sir Francis Galton, writing a few years later, but without doubt independently, in 1905, on “Restrictions in Marriage,” and “Eugenics as a Factor in Religion” (Sociological Papers of the Sociological Society, vol. ii, pp. 13, 53), remarks:  “Religious precepts, founded on the ethics and practice of older days, require to be reinterpreted, to make them conform to the needs of progressive nations.  Ours are already so far behind modern requirements that much of our practice and our profession cannot be reconciled without illegitimate casuistry.  It seems to me that few things are more needed by us in England than a revision of our religion, to adapt it to the intelligence and needs of this present time....  Evolution is a grand phantasmagoria, but it assumes an infinitely more interesting aspect under the knowledge that the intelligent action of the human will is, in some small measure, capable of guiding its course.  Man has the power of doing this largely, so far as the evolution of humanity is concerned; he has already affected the quality and distribution of organic life so widely that the changes on the surface of the earth, merely through his disforestings and agriculture, would be recognizable from a distance as great as that of the moon.  Eugenics is a virile creed, full of hopefulness, and appealing to many of the noblest feelings of our nature.”

As will always happen in every great movement, a few fanatics have carried into absurdity the belief in the supreme religious importance