On Moral Values and religion, so called.

The following quotation from Charles Dickens' preface to his Pickwick Papers seems particularly apt (as well as Dickens' quote from Jonathon Swift) during our present day discussion of moral values, Christianity, and religion in general.

"Lest there be any well-intentioned persons who do not perceive the . . . difference between religion and the cant of religion, piety and the pretense of piety, a humble reverence for the great truths of Scripture and an audacious and offensive obtrusion of its letter and not its spirit in the commonest dissensions and meanest affairs of life, to the stand that it is always the latter, and never the former which is satirized here. Further, that the latter is here satirized as being, according to all experience, inconsistent with the former, impossible of union with it, and one of the most evil and mischievous falsehoods existent in society – whether it establish its headquarters, for the time being in Exeter Hall, or Ebenezer Chapel, or both. It may appear unnecessary to offer a word of observation on so plain a head. But it is never out of season to protest against the coarse familiarity with sacred things which is busy on the lip and idle in the heart, or against the confounding of Christianity with any class of persons who, in the words of SWIFT, have just enough religion to make them hate, and not enough to make them love, one another."