The reason of this seeming contradiction is, however, not altogether difficult. It is to be found partly in the fact that religion, like morality, being counter to those laws which govern the physical world and the animal man,--to the law of egoism and competition and struggle for existence; to the law that "might is right,"--tends from the very nature of the case towards decay and disintegration. The movement of material progress is in some sense a downhill movement. No doubt it evokes much seeming virtue, such as is necessary to secure the end; but the motive force is one with regard to which man is passive rather than active, a slave rather than a master, as a miser is in respect to that passion which stimulates him to struggle for gain. Religion and morality are uphill work, needing continual strain and attention if the motive force is to be maintained at all. Huxley, in one of his later utterances, allowed this with regard to morality; and it is not less but more true with regard to faith in the value of unseen realities. Even if belief in a moral God be as natural to man as are the promptings of conscience, it ought not to surprise us that it should be as universally stifled, neglected, seemingly denied, as conscience is. It is not usually in old age and after years of conflict with the world that conscience is most sensitive and faithful to light, but rather in early childhood. And similarly the sense of God and of His will is apparently more strong and lively in the childhood of races than after it has been stifled by the struggle for wealth and pre-eminence-- When yet I had not walked above A mile or two from my first love: But felt through all this fleshly dress Bright shoots of everlastingness. [2] Degradation may almost be considered a law of religion and morality which needs some kind of violent counteraction, some continual intervention and providence, if it is to be kept in check. After all, this is only a dressing-up of the old platitude that a holy life means continual warfare and straining of the spirit against the flesh, of the moral order against the physical order, of altruism or the true egoism against selfishness or the false egoism. Of course an ideal civilization would help and not hinder religion; but the chances against civilization being ideal are so large as to make it historically true that, advance in civilization does not always mean advance in religion and morality, and often means decay.