Religion, however, has an inverse history. It starts from the individual, it is extended to the community. The individual must have a sense of a power outside himself, whom he is called upon to worship or propitiate, before he can rise to the idea of tribal gods. The fetish can be adored, the ancestor addressed in prayer, before the family has become the tribe, or promiscuous intercourse has passed into polygamy.
The association of morality and religion, therefore, is not only not a necessity, but it is of comparatively late origin in the history of mankind. Indeed, the union of the two is by no means complete even yet. Orthodox Christianity still maintains that correctness of belief is at least as important as correctness of behaviour, and it is not so long ago that men were punished and done to death, not for immoral conduct, but for refusing to accept some dogma of the Church. In the eyes of the Creator, the correct statement of abstruse metaphysical questions was supposed to be of more importance than the fulfilment of the moral law.
The first step in the work of bringing religion and morality together was to place morality under the sanction of religion. The rules of conduct which the experiences of social life had rendered necessary or advantageous were enforced by an appeal to the terrors of religious belief. Practices which sinned against the code of social morality were put under the ban of the gods and their ministers, and those who ventured to adopt them were doomed to destruction in this world and the next. The _tapu_, which was originally confined to reserving certain places and objects for the use of the divine powers, was invoked for the protection of ethical laws, or to punish violations of them, and the curse of heaven was called down not only upon the enemy of the tribe, but upon the enemy of the moral code of the tribe as well.
Religion thus became tribal as well as personal; the religious instinct in the individual clothed itself with the forms of social life, and the religious conceptions which had gathered round the life of the family were modified and transferred to the life of the community. It was no longer only a feeling of fear or reverence on the part of the individual which made him bow down before the terrors of the supernatural and obey its behests; to this were now added all the ties and associations connected with the life of a tribe. The ethical element was joined to the religious, and what has been termed the religious instinct or consciousness in the individual man attached itself to the rules and laws of ethical conduct. But the attachment was, in the first instance, more or less accidental; long ages had to pass before the place of the two elements, the ethical and religious, was reversed, and the religious sanction of the ethical code was exchanged for an ethical sanction of religion. It needed centuries of training before a Christian poet could declare: "He can't be wrong whose life is in the right."