580 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
tion. Nobody has ever done what the Bible says. What men have always done, if they tried to do right, was to conform to the mores of the group and the time. Monastic and puritan sects have tried over and over again in the history of the church to obey the gospel injunctions. They begin by a pro- test against the worldliness of the church. They always have to segregate themselves. Why? They must get out of the current mores of society and create an environment of their own where they can nurse a new body of mores within which the acts they desire to practice will be possible. They have always especially desired to create a society with the mores which they approved, and to do this they needed to control coming generations through their children or successors. No such effort has ever succeeded. All the churches, and nearly all the Christian denominations have, until within a few years, resisted investigation of the truth of history and nature. They have yielded this position in part but not altogether; within a year we have heard of a movement in the Church of Rome to test and verify traditions about history and nature. So far, it has been suppressed. In the mores of today of all the intelli- gent classes the investigation of truth is a leading feature, and with justice, since the welfare of mankind primarily depends on correct knowledge of the world in which we live, and of human nature. It is a very heinous fault of the ecclesiastical organizations that they resist investigation or endeavor to con- trol its results. It alienates them from the mores of the time, and destroys their usefulness. The mores will control the re- ligion as they have done hitherto, and as they do now. They have forced an abandonment of ritual and dogma.
However, the case which is really important and which always presents itself in the second stage is that logical infer- ences as to what men ought to do are constructed upon the world-philosophy. In the New Testament the scribes and Pharisees were denounced because they had bound heavy bur- dens and laid them on men's shoulders. This referred to the rabbinical constructive duties of ritual and behavior — an elabo- rate system of duties in which energy was expended with no
