It has been assumed so generally by religious advocates that some theologic dogma is necessary to every system of morality that the assumption needs direct traverse. It is put to-day by many of those who are attacking secular education for the young that without religious teaching there is no morality possible. This inaccuracy of speech is the result of centuries of supernaturalistic bias. Buckle considers Charron’s “Treatise on Wisdom” as the first “attempt made in a modern language to construct a system of morals without the aid of theology.” Charron says (Book II, chap. 5, sec. 4) that moral duties “are purely the result of a reasonable and thinking mind.” It will be contended here that every system of “supernatural” morality is necessarily uncertain, arbitrary, and confusing. That moral progress is only made in the ratio in which supernaturalism is diminished. THE RATIONALIST VIEW To the rationalist that act is moral which tends to the greatest happiness of the greatest number of the human family with the least injury to any. That is, the test of the morality of any act is its utility. The experience of all ages, collated and classified by the most careful and accurate amongst investigators and profound thinkers, and checked and verified by each day’s new discoveries and newer speculations, furnishes each individual with a sufficient but not infallible moral guide. Morality is social; that is, all acts are moral which tend to promote, build up, and ensure the permanent well being of society. Tendencies to moral conduct are transmitted partly by the training of the young by those already with recognised habit of life, and partly by the influence of heredity. In England Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill have been chiefly identified with the modern affirmation of this utilitarian theory, and R. Hildreth, the translator of Dumont’s “Bentham,” says: “Whatever may be thought of the principle of utility, when considered as the foundation of morals, no one now-a-days will undertake to deny that it is the only safe rule of legislation.” Theologians object to the rationalist presentment of morality: (a) That, according to the rationalist, morality varies, or, (b) that at any rate the conceptions of morality vary. That with different persons, therefore, there may be different views of what is moral, and there being no reliable, unchangeable, and definite standard, the rationalist position is chaotic. (c) The theologian asks, who is to judge on each act, whether or not it is moral? and (d) the theologian alleges that the measure of rational morality is the equivalent of mere individual selfishness, i.e. that the rationalist only seeks his own happiness, that is, only seeks to gratify his own desires.