_Religions Third Postulate: the Ethical Significance of the Unseen
World_
Our account of the rise and progress of the general belief in an Unseen
World is, however, not yet complete. No mention has been made of an
element which apparently has always been present in the belief. I mean
the ethical element. The savage's primeval ghost-world is always mixed
up with his childlike notions of what he ought to do and what he ought
not to do. The native of Tierra del Fuego, who foreboded a snowstorm
because one of Mr. Darwin's party killed some birds for specimens,
furnishes an excellent illustration. In a tribe living always on the
brink of starvation, any wanton sacrifice of meat must awaken the wrath
of the tutelar ancestral ghost-deities who control the weather. Notions
of a similar sort are connected with the direful host of omens that dog
the savage's footsteps through the world. Whatever conduct the
necessities of clan or tribe have prohibited soon comes to wear the
aspect of sacrilege.
Thus inextricably intertwined from the moment of their first dim dawning
upon the consciousness of nascent Humanity, have been the notion of
Deity, the notion of an Unseen World, and the notions of Right and
Wrong. In their beginnings theology and ethics were inseparable; in all
the vast historic development of religion they have remained
inseparable. The grotesque conceptions of primitive men have given place
to conceptions framed after wider and deeper experience, but the union
of ethics with theology remains undisturbed even in that most refined
religious philosophy which ventures no opinion concerning the happiness
or misery of a future life, except that the seed sown here will
naturally determine the fruit to be gathered hereafter. All the
analogies that modern knowledge can bring to bear upon the theory of a
future life point to the opinion that the breach of physical continuity
is not accompanied by any breach of ethical continuity. Such an opinion
relating to matters beyond experience cannot of course be called
scientific, but whether it be justifiable or not, my point is that
neither in the crude fancies of primitive men nor in the most refined
modern philosophy can theology divorce itself from ethics. Take away the
ethical significance from our conceptions of the Unseen World and the
quasi-human God, and no element of significance remains. All that was
vital in theism is gone.
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