Some there are, accustomed to the vision of tables of stone engraved by the hand of God and set up for man’s obedience amid Sinaitic thunders, for whom the discovery of the humble human and prehuman origin, and the stumbling hit-or-miss evolution, of morality dulls its sanctity.  But any one who is tempted for this reason to deride morality may console himself with the reflection that everything else of supreme importance in human life is of plebeian ancestry.  Reason, art, government, religion, had their crude and superstition-ridden beginnings.  Man himself was once hardly different from a monkey.  Yet there is a spark of the divine in him and in all these arts and institutions which he with the aid of the cosmic forces has evolved.  Surely a juster judgment may find a sublimity in this age-long march from the clod toward the millennium that could never belong to the spectacular but very provincial myths of the Semites.  The emotions ever lag behind the intellect; and our hearts may still yearn for the neighborly and passionate battle-god of the Pentateuch.  Moreover, we shall continue to recognize a vast fund of truth and insight in those early folk tales and primitive codes.  But there comes a deeper breath to the man who realizes that morality and religion long antedate the Jewish revelation, and comes to see God in the tens and hundreds of thousands of years of slow but splendid human progress.  Historical codes of morals are, indeed, seamed with superstition and are progressively displaced; but morality persists.  At no time has man wholly solved the problem of life, but he must ever live by the best solution he has found.  The innumerable codes are so many experiments, their very differences bearing witness to the need of some set of guiding principles for conduct.

It is sometimes said that morality, being a merely human invention, may be discarded when we choose.  To this we may reply that morality bears, indeed, the indisputable marks of human instinct, will, and reason; but it is not an invention; it is a lesson, slowly learned.  In its humanness lies its value.  It is not an alien code, irrelevant to human nature; it is a natural function; it is the greatest of human institutions unless that be religion, which is its flower and consummation.  Morality is made for man, for his use and guidance; what could possibly have greater sanctity or authority for him?  Rebel as he may, and chafe under its restraints, he always comes back to morality; perhaps to a revised code, but to essentially the same control; for he cannot do without it.  Our morality has its defects, but it is on the right track.  A clearer insight into its teleological necessity, the purpose it exists to serve, will direct us in our efforts to revise it, so to fashion it as to make it productive of still greater good in the time to come.  But if we discard it altogether, we are “like the base Indian” who “threw a pearl away, Richer than all his tribe.”