"The Supernaturalists charge the system of the Rationalists with a lack of any effective motive that can constrain ordinary and average men to live a moral life. 'It is all very well,' they say, 'for your Spinozas, your Stuart Mills, and such like, to affect independence of supernatural sanctions, because they are exceptional men, and have powers of discernment and will, by which they appropriate to themselves the moral doctrine and practice of Christianity, while they refuse to acknowledge their debt.'... I daresay I might, with some success, retort the argument of Supernaturalism. 'It is all very well,' I might say, 'for your apostles and saints, for your Augustines and Luthers and Bunyans, to depend on supernatural sanctions, because they are exceptional men, and have powers of imagination which turn shadows into substance.'... There is such a thing as self-respect; no man likes to feel ashamed of himself. There are very few who are not strongly moved by a desire to see wife and children or parents happy. Such influences as these have far more to do with moulding human life and resisting selfish passion than any fear of hell or desire of heaven, or any philosophical principles. And such influences as these will survive even when open denial of supernatural sanction becomes as general as tacit disbelief is now." [338]--J. Allanson Picton. "For the mass of mankind two motives serve to direct the main course of ethics. These are Prudence and Sympathy.... Prudence is the first step in morality.... Sympathy did not wait to be called into life by religion. It was born among the brutes.... In the case of man the sympathy which issues first through the natural emotions of family and sex is spread over an ever-widening area by the power of imagination. A greater faculty of entering into the feelings of others goes along with a deeper sensitiveness to their pains and joys. Their experience becomes ours. Our self is blended with theirs. We pity their actual sufferings, and, calling up in imagination the suffering our conduct might entail, we shrink from committing a wrong.... Pity is the characteristic mark of the later ethics." [339]--F. J. Gould. "One can say without exaggeration that the most religious times and the most religious peoples, or those in which or among whom the power of the Church has been the strongest, have, generally speaking, been the most immoral. One has evidence enough in the horrors of the Middle Ages, and, if to-day it be otherwise, it is not to religion we owe the change, but to the spread of education and the progress of intelligence.... It is one of the fatalest and most widespread of errors that morality without religion is impossible. It has long been scientifically acknowledged that morality, as such, is far older than religion.... Morality comes only as the consequence and result of the inevitable necessities of social intercourse." [340]--Ludwig Büchner.