More effective than any of the agencies thus far mentioned in determining the moral code of a people is occupation. “Man’s character,” as the economist Alfred Marshall truly affirms, “has been molded by his everyday work ... more than by any other influence unless it be that of his religious ideals.”[18] Every occupation develops a characteristic group of virtues. This is especially true of agriculture. “The cultivation of the soil,” says Wedgwood, “cultivates much besides--it molds ideals, implants aspirations, creates permanent tendencies. It gives, where it is the predominant industry, to the character of a people its moral stamp.”[19] Finally we mention religion as the most potent of all agencies in the molding of the moral type.[20] Religion has been the great schoolmaster in the moral education of the race. It is true that religion has to go to school itself in morals before it can become a schoolmaster. That is to say, religion in its beginnings is in the main unethical. In its lower manifestations it is hardly more than a system of incantations and sorcery. One of the most important facts of the moral history of the race is the gradual moralization of man’s at first unethical conception of the gods, and the rise out of the unethical religions of primitive times of the great ethical world religions. [Sidenote: In what virtue or moral goodness consists] Having defined ethical ideals and noted the agencies determining their cast and content, we may now seek an answer, in terms of the ethical ideal, to the question, In what does moral goodness consist? All the truly great seers and moral teachers of the race have here the same word for us, and it is this: Do the thing thou seest to be good; realize thy ideal. In the words of Sabatier, “The essential thing in the world is not to serve this ideal or that, but with all one’s soul to serve the ideal which one has chosen.” Such loyalty to one’s ideal is moral goodness.[21] This imperative of conscience that one be true and loyal to the best one knows is the only thing absolute and categorical in the utterance of the moral faculty. [Sidenote: Every age must be judged by its own moral standard]