In England of the 1860s the word secularization began its metaphorical career in phrases like the secularization of art or the secularization of politics. In Germany the word Säkularisation only began its metaphorical career some twenty years later, and not quite in the same contexts. It began to be used in a moral context; in phrases like the secularization of morality, which was intended to describe, the freeing of morality from its basis in theology. It was taken by a German historian of philosophy, Friedrich Jodl, (1889) from French historians of philosophy.

To find a morality detached from religion was nothing new in the world, being as old as philosophy if not older. The individual thinker had a choice of three or four ethical systems, none of which needed religion to stand as systems. Philosophers well knew that their task of constructing a theory of moral obligation was not made easier if they confessed God's rule.

But our problem does not directly concern the existence of a satisfying theory of ethics. We are interested, not in the construction of a system, but the way in which moral axioms take root in a whole society, how they change, and on what foundations ordinary men believe them to stand. At the beginning of the century nearly everyone was persuaded that religion and morality were inseparable; so inseparable that moral education must be religious education, and that no sense of absolute obligation in conscience could be found apart from religion. That moral philosophers taught the contrary made no difference.