It is clear that the Greeks are largely responsible for bringing
religion in Europe to the present _impasse_, where many people
seriously hold that if we cease to affirm the incredible and the
unproven, morals will suffer, and that a boy had better believe in
hell when he is entrusted with his first latch-key. But it is the
Greek also who can get us out. Whatever worthy sense we attach to the
word "religious," the Greeks illustrate it. Their extraordinary moral
earnestness is obscured for us only by the variety of their appeals to
our attention. But they never from first to last allowed religion to
swallow morals. They first of men perceived and declared that morals
are man-made and are constantly to be altered by man; that the state
exists to secure the noblest life for the citizens; that therefore
social science, by definition, (says Aristotle) deals with right
conduct. Plato was deeply interested in all the problems of religion,
and alive to all the religious implications of the mysterious universe
in which we live; but he worked out in his masterpiece--_The
Republic_--a complete account of the social origin and sanction of
ethics. And as for his theology, "the father and maker of all this
universe," said he, "is past finding out; and even if we found him, to
tell of him to all men would be impossible."
Contemporary writers on religion are trying, thus far unsuccessfully,
to agree on a definition of their subject. But while no one can define
religion, everyone feels what it is. No society that we know of has
been without it, and there is no reason to suppose that it will ever
disappear. Both religion and morals are apparently social products,
both are, as far as we can see, indestructible, and both have suffered
cruelly from too close a union. And when they recover their
independence, the religious emotion, like the other emotions, must be
governed by morals.