582 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
duction — perhaps repeated logical deductions, resulting in dog- mas as an arbitrary injunction — and then new action. The ecclesiastics or philosophers get a chance to introduce selfish elements for their own aggrandizement. Next these dogmatic products are brought back to the world of experience and action as imperative rules of conduct. They may win outward respect and pretended obedience, but they are evaded. The moral product is chicane and hypocrisy, and this is what enters into the mores. At the same time, if the religion offers any bribes or concessions to human passion or weakness, the mores seize upon these and swell them into the vices of an age. If the church sets rigid and arbitrary rules it has to sell dispensations ; why then should not the age become venal? If people revel in descriptions of torture and agony they will be callous to it. If the religion presents sensual indulgence as a reward of good conduct, then sensuality is an ideal. It is licensed, not restricted. In primitive society all customs were sanctioned by ghosts. Hence all customs are ritual; hence abortion, infanticide, kill- ing the old, cannibalism, etc., etc., were all ritual acts and not only proper, but within the prescribed conditions they were duties. When Christendom declared sex-renunciation to be the ideal of perfection for one half of civilized men, and Moham- medanism presented sex-pleasure as the ideal for the other, a striking picture was presented of the two poles of excess and ill between which men are placed with respect to this great dominant interest of the race. All religions are creations of fantasy. They come out of the realm of metaphysics. They come down into this world of sense with authority. The moral ideas come out of the mores which move, and they are used to criticize the religious traditions which remain stereotyped. Religions enjoin acts which have become abominable in the mores, such as cannibalism, human sacrifice, child-sacrifice, prostitution, intoxication. They aim to supersede experience, knowledge, and reason by labors and injunctions. Galton^ says: "The religious instructor, in every creed, is one who makes it his profession to saturate his pupils with preju-
- Human Faculty, p. 210,
