Let us try to study this view of the case by the help of a few examples.
In early times, of course, men obeyed moral instruction through religious motives.

If asked why they thought it was wrong to perform certain actions and right to perform others, they could have answered only that such was ancestral custom and that the gods will it so.

Not until we could understand the laws governing the evolution of society could we understand the reason of many ethical regulations.

But now we can understand very plainly that the will of the gods, as our ancestors might have termed it, represents divine laws indeed, for the laws of ethical evolution are certainly the unknown laws shaping all things--suns, worlds, and human societies.

All that opposes itself to the operation of those universal laws is what we have been accustomed to call bad, and everything which aids the operation of those laws is what we have been accustomed to think of as good.