In a contribution by Dr. Adler, head of the fellowship, on one of the fundamentals of the Movement, we see full traces of this deplorable effort to divorce Ethics from science, and wed her to theology.
In discussing "The Religion of Duty," the professor, instead of explaining duty in the terms of science, tries to make of it a deeper mystery even than the thrice veiled dogmas of the churches. "Duty," he says, "becomes religion when we recognize that it is not a law or a command that has a merely sensible origin, or can be explained in terms of sensible experience, that we can get to the bottom of it and thoroughly penetrate it with our understanding, or see fully the use of it. * * * It is then that we come to realize that in the moral command there is something awful." The language is not very clear--perhaps because the thought is not very clear--but we believe its meaning is that, a moral command is awful because we cannot understand it. Prof. Adler seems to make of duty a new kind of a god. The qualities and attributes of the deity he bodily transfers to his successor--_Duty_. Accordingly, Duty becomes just as mysterious and awful as God, and we can no more get at the "bottom" of Duty than we can understand the Deity. Duty no more than the Deity can be "expressed in terms of sensible experience," hence it is inexplicable; and the only way we can feel "the majesty and inexplicable augustness of it," says the professor, "is to draw back the curtains and see," and then "we shall find that out of this relation we suddenly get religion." I fear we get it a little too suddenly. Such rapid transformations suggest a _deus ex machina_.
There is serious danger of making a fetish out of the word duty. The thinking world has abandoned theism because of the impossibility of explaining in terms of sensible experience, the existence of a personal infinite; but now Prof. Adler wishes to surround his new deity, Duty, with the same "clouds and darkness" which have so long hung about the ancient divinities.
In what sense is it a compliment to the moral law to say that it cannot be "explained in terms of sensible experience"? What is gained by putting a dead wall or "curtains" between the intelligence of man and his conscience? Why sneer at the scientific explanation of the origin and growth of the moral sense by calling it "narrow, secular, materialistic and paltry," as Prof. Adler does in this lecture--when no better explanation is offered than a mere rhetorical recommendation "to draw back the curtains and see the majesty and inexplicable augustness of it"? What are these curtains? Who put them there to hide such "augustness"? If the scientific explanation of the origin of the moral sense is a "flat failure," quoting from the professor again, what is _his_ explanation? We are really grieved to see so influential a public leader taking sides against science, the only dependable teacher we have, notwithstanding its many limitations.