When men pit science against
religion, they usually refer to its superior power of explaining
reality. And if it be objected that therefore no morally educative
agency would remain if religion were discarded, the answer is simple. A
system of moral idealism founded on science--it is absurd to call it
science--does exist, and might at any time be enlarged to the
proportions of a national or international educative agency. As yet it
is left to individual cultivation or crystallised in a few tiny
associations, such as Ethical and Secularist and, partly, Socialist
Societies; and I venture to say, from a large experience of these
bodies, that, apart from the professed peace societies, they have been
more assiduous than any religious associations in England, in proportion
to their work, in demanding the substitution of arbitration for war, and
that the overwhelming majority, almost the entirety, of their members
are pacifists. To speak of this small organised force, with its slender
influence, as equally discredited with the far mightier and
thousand-year-older influence of the Churches would be strangely
incongruous; and it is hardly less incongruous to drag science into the
comparison.
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