Page:Literature and Dogma (1883).djvu/73

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tion to conduct, of care for what in conduct is right and good, grew morality and religion both; but, from the time when the soul felt the motive of religion, it dropped and could not but drop the other. And the motive of doing right, to a sincere soul, is now really no longer his own welfare, but to please God; and it bewilders his consciousness if you tell him that he does right out of self-love. So that, as we have said that the first man who, as a being of a large discourse, looking before and after, controlled the blind momentary impulses of the instinct of self-preservation, and controlled the blind momentary impulses of the sexual instinct, had morality revealed to him; so in like manner we may say, that the first man who was thrilled with gratitude, devotion, and awe, at the sense of joy and peace, not of his own making, which followed the exercise of this self-control, had religion revealed to him. And, for us at least, this man was Israel.

Now here, as we have already pointed out the falseness of the common antithesis between ethical and religious, let us anticipate the objection that the religion here spoken of is but natural religion, by pointing out the falseness of the common antithesis, also, between natural and revealed. For that in us which is really natural is, in truth, revealed. We awake to the consciousness of it, we are aware of it coming forth in our mind; but we feel that we did not make it, that it is discovered to us, that it is what it is whether we will or no. If we are little concerned about it, we say it is natural; if much, we say it is revealed. But the difference between the two is not one of kind, only of degree. The real antithesis, to natural and revealed alike, is invented, artificial. Religion springing out of an experience of the power, the grandeur, the necessity of righteousness, is revealed religion, whether we find it in Sophocles or in Isaiah. 'The will of mortal men did not beget it, neither shall