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MORALITY AND FEAR OF PUNISHMENT
social requirements, and his fear of punishment must be
exploited to this end as far as may be necessary; but moral
ideas merely complicate the situation. Let it be accepted that
people behave from purely selfish motives, and train them so
that they will behave socially because it is to their interest to do
sO.
This is the point of view of scientific materialism, which
regards moral feelings and attitudes as symptoms of mental
illness. It is implicit also in the teachings of several schools of
analytical psychology that take the prevailing pattern of social
behaviour as the norm and regard their patients as cured when
their behaviour fits into it.
Religion and Fear
Before we raise objections to this point of view, as Christians,
we must be prepared to answer the retort that, looked at
objectively, Christian morality encourages these same ideas.
The individual accepts it, we are told, because he understands
that it will further his quest for happiness or because he is
afraid of eternal punishment. And must we not admit that
people often behave like Christians for purely selfish reasons?
’There is no point in denying that in religion generally fear
has often played a greater part than love and confidence. The
more primitive the faith, the greater is the emphasis on the
importance of appeasing potentially hostile unknown powers.
Within Christianity itself far too much has been preached about
punishment and doom.
As an aspect of man’s development in spiritual insight and
religious sensitivity this is not surprising, for the history of
religion is the history of man’s attempts to come to terms with
the unknown; and the unknown is the primary occasion of fear,
not because the unknown is itself ‘fear-full’, but because fear
arises in the awareness of contrast; and, in an encounter with
the unknown, this contrast is heightened to infinity. For
reasons inherent in the nature of man’s relation with his
environment, his first impulse is always to ascribe the fear he
feels to the action or nature of the stimulus that evokes it.
Necessarily, therefore, primitive religion—and all religion
that is primitive in the quality of its insight—is preoccupied
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