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problem is at bottom a moral problem. To the student of the ethical phase of history all social reformers from the old Hebrew prophets down to Karl Marx and Henry George are primarily moralists pleading for social justice, equity, and righteousness.

And preëminently the same is it with religion. Religion has been a great part of the life of man, and the historian of morals must be a diligent student of religious systems of the world, but mainly because religion has been in general such a potent agency in the moral education of mankind. For it is the ethical factor in the great world religions which constitutes their universal and permanent element. "It is the function of religion to kindle moral enthusiasm in society at large."[1] "Christianity has not other function or value than as an aid to morality."[2] All the great religions of the world—Buddhism, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism (reckoning historic Judaism as beginning with the great prophets of the ninth and eighth centuries B.C.), Christianity, and Islam—began as moral reforms.[3]

In short, in the words of Wellhausen, "Morality is that for the sake of which all other things exist; it is the alone essential things in the world."[4] The really constructive and regulative forces in history are in truth moral ideas and convictions. And there is vast significance in this—that the ethical motive, never absent and always active, is constantly becoming more and more dominant in the processes of the historical evolutions. As the ages pass there enters into history—we shall see this to be so later—an ever larger ethical

  1. ↑ Ralph Barton Perry, The Moral Economy (1909), p. 254
  2. ↑ Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Practical Reason; Cited by Fisher, History of the Christian Church
  3. ↑ "It is probable indeed that every movement of religious reform has originated in some clearer conception of the ideal of human conduct, arrived at by some person or persons."—T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, 5th ed., p. 361.
  4. ↑ Prolegomena to the History of Israel, tr. Black and Menzies (1885), p. 472; summing up the moral teachings of the prophet Amos.
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