community. But, at this period in the history of humanity, the morality of the community was the custom of the community; and the god of the community from the first necessarily upheld the custom, that is, the morality of the community. Spirits "as such," that is to say, spirits which animated inanimate things but which were not the protectors of any human community, were, for the very reason that they were not the gods of any community, "not concerned with morality." Spirits, however, which were the protectors of a community necessarily upheld the customs and therefore the morality of the community; they were not "without ethical significance." It was an essential part of the very conception of such spirits--of spirits standing in this relation to the community--that they were "ethical powers." Höffding's dictum that "the gods appear as powers on which man is dependent, but not as patterns of conduct or administrators of an ethical world order" (p. 323), overlooks the fact that in the earliest times not only are gods powers on which man is dependent, but powers which enforce the conduct required by the custom of the community and sanction the ethical order as {220} far as it has then been revealed. The fact that "the worship of the family, of the clan, or of the nation is shared in by all," not merely "helps to nourish a feeling of solidarity which may acquire ethical significance," as Höffding says (p. 325), it creates a solidarity which otherwise would not exist. If there were no worship shared in by all, there would be no religious solidarity; and, judging from the very general, if not universal, occurrence of religion in the lowest races as well as the highest, we may conjecture that without religious solidarity a tribe found it hard or impossible to survive in the struggle for existence. That religious solidarity however is not, as Höffding suggests, something which may eventually "acquire ethical significance"; it is in its essence and from the beginning the worship of a god who punishes the community for the ethical transgression of its members, because they are not merely violations of the custom of the community, but offences against him. When Höffding says (p. 328) "religious faith ... assumes an independent human ethic, which has, as a matter of fact, developed historically under the practical influence of the ethical feeling of man," he seems to overlook the fact that as a matter of history human {221} ethics have always been based--rightly or wrongly--on religious faith, that moral transgressions have always been regarded as not merely wrongs done to a man's neighbour, but also as offences against the god or gods of the community, that the person suffering from foul wrong for which he can get no human redress has always appealed from man to God, and that the remorse of the wrong-doer who has evaded human punishment has always taken shape in the fear of what God may yet do.