For one thing the
state has largely taken the place of the church as the organ of the
collective conscience of the community. It can hardly be said that the
Anglican church has an articulate conscience apart from questions of
canon law and ecclesiastical property; and other churches are, as
bodies, no better provided with creeds of social morality. The Eighth
Commandment is never applied to such genteel delinquencies as making a
false return of income, or defrauding a railway company or the customs;
but is reserved for the grosser offences which no member of the
congregation is likely to have committed; and it is left to the state
to provide by warning and penalty against neglect of one's duty to
one's neighbour when one's neighbour is not one individual but the sum
of all. It was not by any ecclesiastical agitation that some humanity
was introduced into the criminal code in the third decade of the
nineteenth century; and the protest against the blind cruelty of
economic _laissez faire_ was made by Sadler, Shaftesbury, Ruskin,
and Carlyle rather than by any church. Their writings and speeches
awoke a conscience in the state, which began to insist by means of
legislation upon humaner hours and conditions of labour, upon decent
sanitation, upon a standard of public education, and upon provision
being made against fraudulent dealings with more helpless fellow-men.
This public conscience has inevitably proved expensive, and the expense
has had to be borne either by the state or by the individual.
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