GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

THE SPLIT 137
of conduct, men's lives were guided by a universal code
whose authority none thought of questioning. Ethics,
thereforev no longer presented a series of problems to be
it announced a series of truths which were
pondered;
revealed, the revelation being of God's will as interpreted
by the Catholic Church. By following the rules of revealed
ethics, by accepting the teachings of inspired authority,
the individual lived aright in this world and achieved
salvation in the next.
But with the advent of Protestantism salvation becomes
a goal which can be achieved without the help of organis-
ations, while the mode of life necessary for its achievement is
one to be determined by the insight of his individual
conscience.
In Protestant countries men no longer looked to .the
Church to prescribe their way of life; they consulted the
Bible or listened to the voice of conscience, preferring
private inspiration to official instruction. Thus the importance
of the individual increased, as that of the Church
diminished.
The Effect of Protestantism. One of the greatest of
the additions which Christianity had made to men's moral
outlook was a sense of the value of the individual soul
or person. Jesus had insisted that men should be treated
as ends in themselves, not as means to ends beyond them-
selves. It would, indeed, have been impossible for any
writer on ethics who accepted Christ's teaching to relegate
the vast mass of citizens to the status which they tend to
occupy in the writing of Plato and Aristotle, the status,
that is to say, of instruments of a good which lay outside
and beyond themselves in the achievement of intellectual
perfectibility by the cultivated few.
Except in the Western democracies, the modern con-
ception of the individual approximates in some respects
to that of Plato and Aristotle. He is treated as a means
to the welfare of the social organism of which he is a
part His raison