the Hebrews—as in Abraham, David, and Solomon, not to mention the precepts of the Mosaic laws—the bands of male and female prostitutes in connexion with Pagan temples, and the curious outbursts of sexual passion in connexion with religious revivals and missions. Another bestial tendency is greed, the strongest grabbing all he can and trampling down the weaker in the mad struggle for wealth: how and when has religion modified this tendency, sanctified as it is in our present civilisation?
All these bestial tendencies will be eradicated only by the recognition of human duty, of the social bond. Religion has not eradicated them, but Science by tracing them to their source in our brute ancestry has explained them and has shown them in their true light. As each recognises that the anti-social tendencies are the bestial tendences in man, and that man in evolving further must evolve out of these, each also feels it part of his personal duty to curb these in himself and so to rise further from the brute. This rational "co-operation with Nature" distinguishes the scientific from the religious person, and this constraining sense of obligation is becoming stronger and stronger in all those who in losing faith in God have gained hope for Man.
"From the general results on the community, I now pass to consider those on the life of the individual which may be expected to follow the collapse of religion". First of these Miss Cobbe puts the loss of "aspiration, the sacred passion, the ambition sainte to become perfect and holy". Needless to say that Miss Cobbe does not explain why the longing after human perfection should disappear with faith in God. To the Atheist it seems that the knowledge that the perfecting of the race is only possible by the improvement of the individual, supplies the most constraining motive which can be imagined for efforts after personal perfection. The Theist may desire personal perfection, but his desire is self-centred; each righteous individual is righteous, as it were, alone, and his righteousness does not benefit his fellows save as it may make him helpful and loving in his dealings with them. The Atheist desires personal perfection not only for his joy in it as beautiful in itself, but because science has taught him the unity of the race, and he knows that each fresh conquest of his over the baser parts of his nature and each strengthening of the higher is a gain for all, and not for
