Kant exposed long ago the most serious injuries of the kind of religious instruction which still prevails. He showed that by making the church's teaching the basis of morality, improper motives were assigned to action. A thing must be avoided, not because God has forbidden it, but because it is in and for itself wrong. Man must aim at good, not because heaven or hell awaits the good or the bad, but because good has a higher value than evil. To this point of view of Kant there must be added the truth, that a position is ethically weakening, when man is presented as incapable of doing good by his own power. So he is told in this as in all other cases, he must be humble and trust in God's help. Confidence in our strength and the feeling of our own responsibility have a strong moral influence. The belief that man is sin-laden, without chance of change, has led him to remain where he is. If the future generation is to grow up with upright souls, the first condition of such growth is to obliterate from the existence of children and young people, by a mighty scratch of the pen, the catechism, Bible history, theology and church history. We must bow down before the infinities and mysteries of our earthly existence and of the world beyond. We must distinguish between and select real ethical values; we must be convinced of the solidarity of mankind, of man's individual duty, to construct for the benefit of the whole race a rich and strong personality. We must look to great models. We must reverence the divine and the regular in the course of the world, in the processes of development of man's mind. These are the new lines of meditation, the new religious feelings of reverence and love, that will make the children of the new century strong, sound, and beautiful. These changes will destroy that idea of God that combines "God help us" with our victories, that has increased the national lust for conquest, the passion for mastery, the instinct of gain. It will be felt that mixing up God in the standards of human passions is blasphemous. People will see, that patriotism, nourished on egoism and ambition, is the most godless thing because the most inhuman of all the life-perverting sins with which man outrages the holiness of life. Intellects which can now pass over the contradiction between Christianity and war, which can even derive strength and consolation from them, have been depraved by the ideas forced upon mankind through thousands of years. Nothing more can be expected from men of such brains, than that they should die in the wilderness, without ever obtaining a sight of the promised land. But the brains of children can be protected from the most unholy of all mental misconceptions, from the superstition that the patriotism, and the nationalism, which injures the rights of others, have something in common with ideas about God.