associated. The amount of civilization achieved is in fact the amount of progress permitted by the associated religion, -which, in most cases, sets such limits to further progress as cannot be passed unless the religion be first abandoned. Thus Fetishism, by teaching that which is false and wrong, and thereby preventing an apprehension of that which is true and right, sets such limits to the progress of its adherents, that it is quite impossible for them to attain to a higher civilization without first abandoning their faith. But as the action of a natural law may be modified by external causes, as, for instance, the action of the law of the expansion of gases is modified by pressure, so the action of the law that connects a civilization with a religion may be modified by the pressure of other civilizations: as, for example, the Mahomedan civilization has been modified in the case of the Turks; and as, far more profoundly, owing to more intimate admixture, the Roman Catholic civilization has been modified by the Protestant;[1] and as, in a lesser degree, the Greek Church civilization has been modified.
This modification, however, is, in a great measure, more apparent than real, and consists rather in an acceptance of the things of the modifying civilization,
- ↑ I speak of the Protestant civilization, but the term is not strictly correct. Our modern civilization should properly be described as one that is disassociated from religion. Thus our literature and notably our various sciences—Biology, Geology, Geography, Astronomy, Ethnology, Etymology, Sanitation, Political Economy, &c.—on which the character of the civilization so largely depends, are quite divorced from the religion, and are even more or less in conflict with it; a result due in great measure to the conflict of opinion among the numerous Protestant sects, which, combined with free intercourse among their members, has caused such a degree of intellectual freedom and activity that the civilization has been changeful and progressive to an extent unknown in lands and ages in which this conflict of opinion, with its resulting freedom of thought, has been unknown—i.e. in which the weight of religious opinion has been solidly against the recognition of any newly-discovered truth.
