Chapter VI

_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.