ABSTRACT
Sharp differences of opinion as to whether moral education can be given satisfactorily apart from religious teaching hinge on the fact that the whole Western world is to some extent consciously and to some extent through tradition and habit, deeply motivated by Christian ideals. The German Federal Republic, perhaps because of its own peculiar problems of adaptation to the post-war era, has the problem of ' morals without religion' and the inconsistent attitude of parents very much in mind. Liberal thinkers throughout Europe, of course, equally cannot accept the authoritarian stand taken by the Catholic Church. Their attitude stems from the teaching of those eighteenth-century philosophers who were preoccupied with the necessity for ensuring man's steady progress towards a better life and who urged their faith in man and in his future and in the perfectibility of human institutions.
