It is man, a religious being, who makes religious institutions, who
creates all the external aspects and appearances of the religious life.
And the same is true precisely in regard to moral precepts. If the Ten
Commandments were blotted out of the memory of man, if every single
ethical teaching of Jesus should perish, if the high and fine moral
precepts of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and all the great teachers of
the pagan world should cease to exist, if there were not a printed
moral precept on earth, morality would not be touched. It is not these
that have created morality. It is the natural moral nature of man that
has written all the commandments, whether they have come to us by the
hand of Moses or of Gautama or Mohammed or Confucius or Seneca, or no
matter who the medium may have been.
Man is a moral being, naturally, essentially, eternally, and this is a
moral universe, inherently, necessarily, eternally; and, though all the
external expression of moral thought and feeling should be lost, the
human race would simply reproduce them again.
It is sometimes well for us to get down to the bed-rock in our
thinking, and find how natural and necessary the great foundations are.
The Hindu priests used to tell their followers that the earth, which
was flat, rested on certain pillars, which rested again on some other
foundation beneath them, and so on until thought was weary in trying to
trace that upon which the earth was supposed to find its stability.
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