"For the mass of mankind two motives serve to direct the main course of ethics. These are Prudence and Sympathy.... Prudence is the first step in morality.... Sympathy did not wait to be called into life by religion. It was born among the brutes.... In the case of man the sympathy which issues first through the natural emotions of family and sex is spread over an ever-widening area by the power of imagination. A greater faculty of entering into the feelings of others goes along with a deeper sensitiveness to their pains and joys. Their experience becomes ours. Our self is blended with theirs. We pity their actual sufferings, and, calling up in imagination the suffering our conduct might entail, we shrink from committing a wrong.... Pity is the characteristic mark of the later ethics." [339]--F. J. Gould.
"One can say without exaggeration that the most religious times and the most religious peoples, or those in which or among whom the power of the Church has been the strongest, have, generally speaking, been the most immoral. One has evidence enough in the horrors of the Middle Ages, and, if to-day it be otherwise, it is not to religion we owe the change, but to the spread of education and the progress of intelligence.... It is one of the fatalest and most widespread of errors that morality without religion is impossible. It has long been scientifically acknowledged that morality, as such, is far older than religion.... Morality comes only as the consequence and result of the inevitable necessities of social intercourse." [340]--Ludwig Büchner.
"The religion of the lower orders of Welshmen may be said to be high in the scale, while their morality is decidedly low.... What savage nations have been raised out of their degradation by Christianity?... I look upon the doctrine of future rewards and punishments as radically bad, and as bad for savages as for civilised men."--Alfred Russel Wallace. [341]
"Heaven and hell have no more relation to the question than any other punishments. The hell which a thoroughly bad man dreads can only be a hell of physical suffering; and, if he abstains from crime through fear of fire, he is not a good man, but a bad man in chains." [342]--Leslie Stephen.