the least important part of them. Imagine, if you will, that Society
originated in the herding of brutes, in their parental instincts, in their
rude attempts at self-preservation:--Man is not man in that he resembles,
but in that he differs from them. We must pass into another cycle of
existence, before we can discover in him by any evidence accessible to us
even the germs of our moral ideas. In the history of the world, which
viewed from within is the history of the human mind, they have been slowly
created by religion, by poetry, by law, having their foundation in the
natural affections and in the necessity of some degree of truth and justice
in a social state; they have been deepened and enlarged by the efforts of
great thinkers who have idealized and connected them--by the lives of
saints and prophets who have taught and exemplified them. The schools of
ancient philosophy which seem so far from us--Socrates, Plato, Aristotle,
the Stoics, the Epicureans, and a few modern teachers, such as Kant and
Bentham, have each of them supplied 'moments' of thought to the world. The
life of Christ has embodied a divine love, wisdom, patience,
reasonableness. For his image, however imperfectly handed down to us, the
modern world has received a standard more perfect in idea than the
societies of ancient times, but also further removed from practice. For
there is certainly a greater interval between the theory and practice of
Christians than between the theory and practice of the Greeks and Romans;
the ideal is more above us, and the aspiration after good has often lent a
strange power to evil. And sometimes, as at the Reformation, or French
Revolution, when the upper classes of a so-called Christian country have
become corrupted by priestcraft, by casuistry, by licentiousness, by
despotism, the lower have risen up and re-asserted the natural sense of
religion and right.

We may further remark that our moral ideas, as the world grows older,
perhaps as we grow older ourselves, unless they have been undermined in us