conventional solution of the great problem of the universe, including our life and its aspirations. If he fails in his duty to society in this 9 respect he suffers accordingly; and indeed few men of any position are bold enough to avow that they are outside all such systems of ecclesiasticism; the very unorthodox must belong to some acknowledged party—they must be orthodox in their unorthodoxy. But as a fact the greater part of cultivated men dare not go so far as that, and are contented with letting society in general feel happy in believing that they subscribe to the general grimace of religion that has taken the place of the real belief, not as yet become a superstition, which allowed practice to be deduced from its solid dream.
Meanwhile it is common, and especially in the more reactionary circles, to find men who privately admit a cynicism that to their minds relieves them from any ethical responsibility, while in public they keep up the farce of supporting a religion that at least professes to have an ethic of its own.
Yet even now it is necessary that a certain code of morality should be supposed to exist and to have some relation to the religion which, being the creation 10 of another age, has now become a sham. With this sham moreover its accompanying morality is also steeped, although it has a use as serving for a cover of a morality really the birth of the present condition of things, and this is clung to with a determination or even ferocity natural enough, since its aim is the perpetuation of individual property in wealth, in workman, in wife, in child.
The so-called morality of the present age is simply commercial necessity, masquerading in the forms of the Christian ethics: for instance, commercial honour is merely the code necessitated by the needs of men in commercial relations which without it could not subsist, and which has au fond nothing in common with the Christian “do unto others as thou wouldst,” etc., maxim, in the name of which it is on occasion