During the Middle Ages morality was not separable from religion. This inseparability lasted for a long time. Eventually morality survived the disappearance of religion, especially in certain Protestant nations. During the Second World War, for example, peoples among whom practitioners of religion were now a very small minority (Scandinavians, English) behaved better than many others among whom a far larger proportion were regular churchgoers, not to speak of Germans and Austrians on whom certain pagan and tribal appeals had a strong hold. This enduring decency of the English-speaking and also of other northwestern European peoples was not, however, the result of the kind of atheistic humanism that existed elsewhere in Europe, the virtues of which intellectuals had preached, believing that this higher kind of man-made morality would simply succeed the disappearance of Christianity. There is reason to believe that the relatively moral behavior of the English, for example, was the often unconscious result of tradition rather than of cerebration, that there remains to this day a deep religious undercurrent in the consciousness of these peoples who were, after all, only superficially affected by the intellectual categories of a Cult of Reason.
Still, at the time of this writing this is scant consolation. The kind of moral consciousness that had its origins in a religious upbringing—whether in the life of peoples or in the life of a single person—may survive the decay of religious belief for a surprisingly long time, but surely not forever. The English, the American, the Scandinavian peoples may yet have to drink the bitterest cups and swallow the dregs of despair. Moreover, the high standards of morality among these peoples were effective in their civic, social, public lives: They reflected a concern with injustice, rather than with untruth. Fairness, rather than honesty, is the great English virtue. At this point I must say that in our critical situation this is no longer enough.
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