Further illustration of progress in Church ethics in recent times is found in the extension of the principle of individual responsibility to the domain of religion.[751] It will be recalled how completely the law of collective responsibility dominates the morality of primitive peoples.[752] With the growth and clearing of the moral sense the injustice of this is perceived, and the principle of individual responsibility comes to be established. This moral movement is consummated earlier in the civil than in the religious domain; that is, the civil-law codes are first modified in accordance with the demands of the truer ethical feeling, and not until later does the religious code, more conservative, undergo a like change. Thus gradually during the medieval time the civil law of the more advanced nations of Western Christendom abrogated the principle of collective responsibility, while the ecclesiastical code retained it far into the nineteenth century. During the last fifty years, however, the best conscience of the Church has rejected the principle as the embodiment of a gross inequity. The doctrine that all the generations of men sinned in the first parent and justly suffer for his transgression has been repudiated by the modern instructed conscience as incredible, untrue, and immoral. This repudiation of the principle of collective responsibility by the ethics of religion harmonizes in this respect Church morality with the morality of the civil codes of the civilized world, and marks the consummation of an ethical evolution which, commencing in the dawn of civilization, covers all the millenniums of human history. _5. Social Ethics: the New Social Conscience_ [Sidenote: (_a_) As manifested in the history of the African slave trade] By the phrase “social conscience,” as we shall use it here, we mean those ethical feelings and judgments which cover the relations of master and slave and the relations of society to its unfortunate and erring members.