Of all aspects of religion none is so difficult to understand as the relation of religion and conduct. It is ever varying. There seems to be nothing fixed about it. What does conduct arise from? It takes its origin in an instinct, and this instinct is so strong, so imperious, so almost personal, that of all the instincts it alone has a name. It is conscience.

By conscience our acts are directed.

There are scientific men who tell us that our consciences are the result of experience, partly our own, but principally inherited. That if conscience warns us against any course of action it is because that has been experienced to result in misfortune. It is an unconscious memory of past experiences. Conscience is instinctive, and not affected by teaching to any great extent; and that conscience is the main guide of life no one will deny.

But do the voices of conscience and of God, as stated in the sacred books, agree?

When the savage sees a god in the precipice and is afraid of him, there is no question of right or wrong. Not that the savage has no code of morals. He has a very elaborate one. But it is usually distinct from his religion. What virtue did Odin teach? None but courage in war. Yet the Northmen had codes of conduct fitted to their stage of civilisation. The Greeks had many gods. They had also codes of morals and an extensive philosophy, but practically there was no connection. In fact, the gods were examples not of morality but of immorality. It was the same with the Latins and with all the Celts. Their religions were emotional religions, their codes of conduct were apart, although even here you see now and then an attempt to connect them. And when the Latin people took Christianity and formed it, they put into their creeds no question of conduct. You believed, and therefore you were a Christian. The results of bad conduct would be annulled by confession, and the sinner would receive absolution. To a Latin Christian a righteous unbeliever who had never done anything but good would in the end be damned, whereas the murderer who repented at the last would be saved. "There is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, than over ninety and nine just persons that need no repentance."

Is the inference that the Latin peoples were wickeder than others? I doubt it. They initiated all European civilisation, and trade and commerce, and law and justice. Probably the highest examples of conduct the world has known have been Latins. They had and have the instinct of conduct, they had and have consciences as good as other people, but only they do not so much connect conduct and religion. You can be saved without conduct.

The Jews, on the contrary, had no instinct of conduct apart from religion. In the Ten Commandments conduct, if it have the second place, has yet the larger share. Righteousness was the keynote of their belief, and if the only righteousness they knew was little better than a noble savagery, it was the best they could do. They included every form of conduct in their religion—sanitary matters, caste observances, and business rules. The Hindu goes even further in the same line. Everything in life is included in his religion.

When in the Reformation the Teutonic people threw off the yoke of Rome, a yoke which was not only religious but political and social, one of their principal arguments against Roman Catholicism was the abominations that had crept in. I think it would be difficult to assert that the people who revolted were in morals generally any better than those they seceded from. Good men in the Latin Church saw equally the necessity for reformation. But bad morals did not seem to them so destructive to faith as it did to the Teutons. There was this difference, that whereas the Latin could and did conceive of religion apart from conduct, the Teuton, like the Jew, could not do so. With the Latin they were distinct emotions, with the Teuton they were connected. One of the principal aspects of the Reformation is the restoration of morality to religion, the abolition of indulgences, of confession and absolution, the insistence on conduct in religious teachers.

The morality of Christ?

The remarkable fact is that it was not the morality of Christ at all. The Reformation was never in any way a revival of the code of the Sermon on the Mount or the imitation of Christ. To a certain extent it went further away from Christ than the Latins. For instance, the Latin priests imitate Christ in being unmarried, the Protestant pastors married. When Calvin burnt Servetus he was not returning to the tenets of the New Testament, and what thought had the Puritans or the French Huguenots, the most masterful of men, of turning the other cheek?

Protestantism was a return of conduct to religion, but it was not Christ's conduct. It was rather the Old Testament code softened by civilised influence that was revived. It was a revolt against excessive emotionalism, and was, in fact, a combination of two creeds tempered as to conduct by the conduct of the day.

So it continues to-day. The Latin's idea of religious conduct is the imitation of Christ, and when a Latin cultivates religious conduct that is what he does. He becomes a priest or monk, poor, celibate, self-denying and unworldly. But conduct to him is not the great part of religion that it is to a Teuton. With us conduct is the greatest part; the mystical and ceremonious part has decreased, in certain sects almost disappeared. Confession disappeared, and with it absolution from priests. Conduct is part of religion, and the code of conduct to be followed is that which conscience bids, and the code of conscience is, scientific men tell us, the result of experience, personal and inherited. Practically, what conscience tells us to do is what suits the circumstances of the day.

Therefore we may say that the religion of the Latins is mainly emotional, that of the Teutons half emotional and half conduct; and then we come to the Buddhist, which is nearly all conduct.

The Latin would say of an unbeliever, "He cannot be saved; faith is the absolute necessity, and faith even at the last moment by itself is sufficient." The Teuton would say, "I do not know. To be a good man, even if an unbeliever, is very much; it may be that God will accept him."

And the Buddhist? He has no doubt at all. Conduct is everything. Believe what you like as long as you act well. To be a Buddhist is best because there you have the way of life set clearly before you, and it is easy for you to follow. But any man can be saved if he act aright. Conduct is everything. In fact, Buddhism in its inception was in one aspect a revolt against excessive emotionalism, that of the ascetics, and it maintains that attitude to-day.

Or, to put it another way: Roman Catholicism is all emotion, Protestantism is half emotion, Buddhism is the suppression of emotion. These are the theories. And the facts? What effect does this difference make on the lives of the peoples?

It may have some effect. There is sometimes action and reaction. These different views of the relation of religion and conduct come from the instincts of the people, and being held and taught they in turn affect the people. But how much? Personally, I believe very little.

A man's daily conduct is regulated by quite other factors. If the effect was great we should find Buddhists the least criminal of peoples, the Teutons a medium, and the Latins without any idea of conduct at all. But this is certainly not true. The Burman is greatly given to certain crimes, the outcome of his stage of civilisation.

And I have great doubts whether the Protestants generally can show any superiority over the Latins when the circumstances are considered. Are the English Roman Catholics less honest than Protestants in the same class? Are sceptics more criminal than religious people? The inclusion of conduct in religion is astonishingly varied. Some peoples cannot be born or come to maturity, or marry, or die without religion; others do not allow religion to have any part in these matters. But the fact remains that, though conduct may be included more or less in every religion, no religion has a code of conduct for daily life. Priests and monks apart, the codes of conduct are not taken from religion.

But it must not be forgotten that neither Christianity nor Buddhism professes to provide a code of conduct for this life. Judaism knew no future life, and its aim was therefore to ensure success in this. That is the reward offered to the righteous—success for them and their children. There is no hint that this life is not good and worth living, that love and wealth are not good things. On the contrary, they are held out as the reward of the godly. The Judaic code was a good and workable one for its age. But Christianity and Buddhism declare that this life is not good; that it is, in fact, absolutely wicked and unhappy, and that therefore all worldly pleasures and successes are to be eschewed as snares. The codes given are ways to reach heaven, they are by no means codes for ordinary life. Followed to their meaning, every Christian ought to be a monk or nun and every Buddhist the same.

But this teaching of the evil of life is one that no one but a few fanatics accept in its fulness, and heaven or Nirvana are ideas that do not appeal to most men. In Latin and Buddhist countries a few with their higher spiritual powers take their faiths very seriously, but the majority try to make the best of both worlds. In Protestant countries no one at all accepts the doctrine of the worthlessness of life. With the immense majority of men of all nations life is held to be a great and beautiful thing, to be used to its best advantage. The Latins with their keener logic, seeing that the code of Christ is for the next world, not for this, and therefore fit only for monks and nuns and not for men of the world, divorce conduct from religion. Protestants, rejecting the code of Christ for men of the world equally with the Latins, yet feeling a need for a code of conduct, adopt the best current code of the day and call that "Christian conduct." Thus are working religions built up. One religion is all conduct, another half, another hardly at all—in theory. But in fact, for ordinary life, is there any difference between the code of a Latin, a Teuton, or a Buddhist? There is hardly any. Codes of life vary very little, and that variation is due never to religious influences, but always to the stage of civilisation and mental development and the environments. In Scotland and North Germany it is common for peasant girls to have a baby first and marry afterwards. A Hindu or a Burman would be horrified at such a thing, just as a better class Scotchman or German would be. But to the people who do it there is no immorality. How do you explain this from religion?

Conduct is an instinct. It evolves according to the civilisation and idiosyncrasy of the people. It is influenced by many causes. People, for instance, who are not pleased by acting call theatres wrong, and so on. Experience is also a factor. And the connection of conduct with religion varies. Some people make it a great part of their religion just as sanitary and social measures are included, other peoples make it less prominent. But conduct does not proceed from religious creeds any more than prayer or confession does. It may be slowly influenced by religious teaching, but it has its own existence, and religious teaching is only one of many influences.