Whether for good or evil the influence of religion on the conduct of men daily grows less. Religious fanaticism is gradually giving place to secular and political fanaticism, whose votaries shriek in the name of Democracy, Socialism or other watchword of Utopia, ever attempting to impose new moral values bearing as little correspondence to reality as the old values. Neither can recent attempts to express the old religion in terms of modern thought revive that which is perishing of inanition. Huxley wrote thus of the attempt: "If the religion of the present differs from that of the past, it is because the theology of the present has become more scientific than that of the past, not because it has renounced idols of wood and idols of stone, but begins to see the necessity of breaking in pieces the idols built up of _books_ and traditions, and fine-spun ecclesiastical cobwebs, and of cherishing the noblest and most human of man's emotions by worship, 'for the most part of the Silent Sort,' at the altar of the _unknown and unknowable_...." We have no desire to follow in the wake of an unprovoked attack on the churches, our concern is the defence of a rational, against the imposition of an irrational, code of morality. But ethical systems are still built upon the fantastical dogmas of religious or political visionaries. "Ethics," say the former, "cannot be built securely upon anything less than the Religious Sanctions." The rules which govern the practical conduct of life must conform to "divine laws" which in their interpretation have passed through a metamorphosis as varied and dissimilar as the habits and customs which distinguish the twentieth century from the second! Was it a sign of the security and infallibility of ethics founded on religious beliefs that Christian England as late as the beginning of the Eighteenth Century[35] sanctioned the execution and torture of harmless old women for the imaginary crime of witchcraft? It must be remembered that the moral code of the period, enforced by the laws of the land, reflected contemporary religious thought. Lecky, referring to the causes upon which witchcraft depended, says:[36] "It resulted, not from accidental circumstances, individual eccentricities, or even scientific ignorance, but from a general predisposition to see Satanic agency in life. It grew from, and it reflected, the prevailing modes of religious thought; and it declined only when those modes were weakened or destroyed." 5.