There can be little doubt, to begin with, that with the great majority of people religion is regarded as essentially one with morality. Whole schools of philosophy have treated the Christian Religion as a question of beauty, and discussed its place among other systems of ethics. Even those systems of theology which profess to draw a deeper distinction have rarely succeeded in establishing it upon any valid basis, or seem even to have made that distinction perceptible to others. So little, indeed, has the rationale of the science of religion been understood that there is still no more unsatisfactory province in theology than where morality and religion are contrasted, and the adjustment attempted between moral philosophy and what are known as the doctrines of grace. Examples of this confusion are so numerous that if one were to proceed to proof he would have to cite almost the entire European philosophy of the last three hundred years. From Spinoza downward through the whole naturalistic school, Moral Beauty is persistently regarded as synonymous with religion and the spiritual life. The most earnest thinking of the present day is steeped in the same confusion. We have even the remarkable spectacle presented to us just now of a sublime Morality-Religion divorced from Christianity altogether, and wedded to the baldest form of materialism. It is claimed, moreover, that the moral scheme of this high atheism is loftier and more perfect than that of Christianity, and men are asked to take their choice as if the morality were everything, the Christianity or the atheism which nourished it being neither here nor there. Others, again, studying this moral beauty carefully, have detected a something in its Christian forms which has compelled them to declare that a distinction certainly exists. But in scarcely a single instance is the gravity of the distinction more than dimly apprehended. Few conceive of it as other than a difference of degree, or could give a more definite account of it than Mr. Matthew Arnold's "Religion is morality touched by Emotion"--an utterance significant mainly as the testimony of an acute mind that a distinction of some kind does exist. In a recent Symposium, where the question as to "The influence upon Morality of a decline in Religious Belief," was discussed at length by writers of whom this century is justly proud, there appears scarcely so much as a recognition of the fathomless chasm separating the leading terms of debate.