Religion in the Future
I
THE trade of prophet survives every discouragement. But few prophets are at the pains to make a cool calculation of the forces the resultant of which they wish to determine. Most of us, when we make predictions, wish to encourage ourselves by declaring that our cause is sure to triumph, and to persuade others that the flowing tide is with us. We have also our optimists, whose barometer is fixed at ‘set fair.’ and our pessimists, who always report ‘stormy.’ And we have to reckon with a strong tendency to assume that the pendulum will go on swinging in its present direction.
For nearly two hundred years the Western nations have made a kind of religion of what they call progress. There is, they hold, a natural tendency, or a divine purpose, that the world shall go on improving from year to year. By progress they mean sometimes that kind of advance which may be measured by statistics, large numbers being superior to small numbers, and sometimes the victory of those causes which they have been taught to call progressive. It is a secularized, but by no means a scientific, form of millenarianism. Some even think that they can find it in the Gospels.
The study of history applies a cold douche to this facile optimism. Nature gives us nothing except at the price of labor, and the eating from the tree of knowledge always drives us out of some paradise or other. Even the paradise of fools is a pleasant residence while it is habitable. And when we look back over the past of religion in order to predict its future, which is our present enterprise, we find that the history of religions — I will not say of religion — has been usually a history of decline. A revelation is purest when it is fresh from the mint. The early preachers of Christianity would have been astonished if they could have seen their successors hunting for their skulls and thigh bones, flogging themselves on the tops of pillars, or, like the Spanish nobleman mentioned by Las Casas, burning alive thirteen Indians ‘in honor of Christ and the Twelve Apostles.’ Buddha would have been equally surprised to hear that his followers are now arranging to operate their prayerwheels by electricity. The melancholy reflection is also borne in upon us that in religion nothing fails like success. The corruptions of the Western Church were never so flagrant as during the socalled Ages of Faith, when an emperor was obliged to hold the stirrup of the Servus Servorum Dei.
It is not surprising that many observers have predicted the gradual decay and ultimate disappearance of all the historical religions, not excluding Christianity. The notion that mankind can dispense with religion is indeed obsolete; history gives no countenance to Comte’s successive stages, in which the worship of man is to succeed the worship of God, till the philosopher of the future, like a new Narcissus, se mirera dans son encrier. But it is a plausible view that, as there seems to be no resurrection of dead mythologies, so Christianity will languish till a new religion captivates the imagination of men and sweeps victoriously over the world. These prophets admit that the time may be long. The Roman haruspices had smiled at each other for centuries before the monks came to relieve them. But, on this view of history, Christianity is a spent force.
This opinion is naturally inadmissible by Christians, and it is not really fortified by history. Religions are by far the toughest of all human institutions. If they die, it is usually because their worshipers have died out. The Olympians disappeared with the Greeks and Romans. The vital religion of the empire passed into the Catholic Church as one of its chief constituents; the nomina rather than the numina were changed. Christianity, thus uprooted from its soil in Palestine and turned into the religion of the European races, satisfied the spiritual and religious needs of those races so thoroughly that it became an essential part of their civilization, as it is to this day. It may be doubtful whether it will ever displace the still older faiths of India, China, and Japan; but any new religion for the white races is almost unthinkable.
II
But of course we must answer the question, What is Christianity? It would be difficult to find any common formula which would include Origen and Torquemada, the Templars and the Quakers, Newman and Kingsley, Oliver Cromwell and Thomas à Ivempis. To identify Christianity with any corporation would be contrary to the whole spirit of the Gospel. Real Christianity must, I suppose, be roughly defined as a way of living and believing based on the recorded teaching and example of Jesus Christ, whose authority is revered as final and absolute. For the purposes of this article I shall assume that this fundamental loyalty underlies all the various types of Christianity.
The two questions to be considered are, to what extent the civilization of Europe and America in the near future is likely to be influenced by religion, and what type of Christianity is likely to be prevalent.
Some will say that a Christian can give only one answer to the former question. If Christianity is true, it must increase in power and influence from age to age, till all the kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of His Christ. This, however, belongs to the superstition of continuous progress to which I have already referred. Whether the human race will ultimately reach moral and intellectual heights now undreamed of, or whether, after a comparatively brief episode of change and unrest, it will relapse into a condition of stable equilibrium, like the bees under their socialistic gynæcocracy of maiden aunts, no one can possibly say. Questions of this kind are not to be settled by revelation or faith. But as regards the near future we can say only this: that if the nations of the West are really progressing, not merely in wealth and scientific knowledge, but in intrinsic worth, moral and intellectual, their religion will become more ethical, more spiritual, more universal, less superstitious, and less obscurantist ; while, on the other hand, if Western civilization has passed its zenith, and is now on the down-grade, we may expect to see a revival of magic, priestcraft, immoral superstition, and narrow bigotry — in a word, of that kind of religion to destroy which Christ suffered Himself to be nailed to the cross, though it has too often flourished under His name.
The type of religion prevalent in any nation cannot be much in advance of the intellectual and moral condition of the population at large. It was alleged by an English official that in Haiti the Christian sacrament sometimes ended in a human sacrifice and cannibalism; and we should not expect to find a high type of Christianity in Abyssinia. An Indian tribe which had been Christianized in the early Middle Ages, and then isolated for centuries from all contact with the West, was found to have forgotten every particle of the Gospel except the two ritual practices of making the sign of the cross and fasting in Lent. In certain circumstances these fragments of ceremonial have been proved to have a greater survival-value than any of the weightier matters of the law.
III
An American divine, some twenty years ago, wrote a book on Coming Catholicism and Passing Protestantism. The course of events during what has passed of the twentieth century has favored this prediction, and the partisans of the Roman Catholic Church are full of confidence that the future is on their side. The number of conversions does not seem to be very great; but the Protestant Churches are visibly losing ground in many countries, and Catholic ideas have in some cases, as in the Anglican Church, transformed the outward appearance of religious bodies which are not recognized by the Romans as Catholic. In Germany especially we are told that Catholicism is ‘winning all along the line.’ The fall of the Hohenzollern dynasty was a blow to Lutheranism, and the threatened disintegration of that proud empire has driven many to look for some spiritual force which may restore unity and discipline. But it must not be taken for granted that Protestantism in Germany is really weaker than it was ten years ago. The very interesting ‘ Youth ‘ movement for plain living and high thinking is spreading over the land, and the misfortunes which have overtaken Germany have deepened the religious tone, which under the rule of militant imperialism had become both shallow and coarse.
In England the Anglo-Catholics are confident and aggressive. They have become unequivocally Latin in their sympathies, and openly desire the reabsorption of the Anglican Church under the Roman obedience. But these epigoni of the Laudians and Tractarians have probably reached the summit of their success. They have no really eminent theologians, and appeal chiefly to the desire for sacerdotal magic, which is never far below the surface in religious minds of a certain type, and to the æsthetic love of ornate ceremonial. The movement is strongest in London, and in the districts fed by the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway, where devout and honorable women mostly congregate. Although Anglo-Catholicism has a long history in the Established Church, it does not seem likely to have a future commensurate with the hopes of its supporters. A schismatical Catholic Church, which divides all other Christians into those who unchurch it and those whom it unchurches, is in too illogical a position even for Englishmen. And a wholesale secession to Rome is most improbable. As Santayana says, an Englishman can hardly become a Catholic in earnest without a breach with all the habits and traditions of his race.
The Roman Catholics place great hopes on the differential birth-rate.
They point to the almost stationary numbers of Protestants in the upper and middle classes, in contrast with the unrestrained fecundity of the Irish, Poles, and French Canadians. The superior fertility of Catholics will, they hope, give their religion a strong numerical predominance in another fifty years. This fecundity, which is usually ascribed to the condemnation of birth-control by the Roman Church, exists only where the population is on a low level of civilization, or where, as in Canada, there is room for more farmers. The Boers, who are Protestants, are as prolific as the French Canadians, and for the same reason, while the French and Belgians, highly civilized Catholics, have almost the lowest birth-rates in the world. The Irish and Poles underbid the Protestants in rough and cheap labor, because they are on a lower cultural level. The Slav races all have an enormous birth-rate and death-rate; in Russia before the war, for example, the birth-rate was 44, the death-rate 28, which may be compared with the figures for Australasia, 26 and 10, giving the same net increase. The probability of America being swamped with low-grade Catholic immigrants has been reduced by recent legislation, and the fecundity of the backward Catholic peoples may be a transient phenomenon. At present, however, it cannot be denied that the differential rate of increase threatens the position of the Protestant Nordic race. It is not primarily a question of religion, but of the survival-value of expensive classes and races as compared with those who are content with a lower standard of life.
Catholicism, as Eucken says, stereotyped as final the form which Christianity reached in the zenith of the Middle Ages, and can admit of no further development except on surface matters. If modern civilization demands changes of a more drastic character, Catholicism will be in a difficult position. Its strength is that it is well adapted to a stage of human culture which is likely always to be well represented, even in civilized communities. It corresponds with an idea of religion which was old before Christianity was young. The liturgy, indeed, and the theological literature, belong to the Græco-Jewish syncretism which was effected in the early centuries of the Church. It owes much to the pagan mystery cults, but it is not polytheistic. But popular Catholicism is very different. As Santayana says: ‘While Mass is being celebrated, the old woman will tell her beads, lost in rumination over her own troubles; the housewife will light her candles, duly blessed for the occasion, to be protected against lightning. . . . Every spot and every man has a particular patron. . . . The miracles attributed to the Virgin under one title are far from being attributable to her under another. . . . A bereaved mother will not fly to the Immaculate Conception for comfort, but of course to Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows. . . . There is a perfect survival of heroes and penates on the one hand and of pagan funeralrites and commemorations on the other. Add Saint Agnes’s and Saint Valentine’s days, with their profane associations, a saint for finding lost articles and another for prospering amourettes . . . this, with what more could easily be rehearsed, makes a complete paganism within the Christian tradition, for which little basis can be found in the Mass, the breviary, or the theologians.’
It would be rash to assume that a religion of magic, miracle, and idolatry cannot succeed in the twentieth century. Thirty years ago most men would have said this with confidence; but there has been an unmistakable revival of the lower kinds of religion during and since the Great War, and a rebellion against the mechanistic science of the last century, fomented not only by ecclesiastics but by certain schools of philosophy and by the new sciences of biology and psychology. Psychology especially, with its reduction of philosophy to the study of the human mind and its states, is favorable to superstition, in so far as it disintegrates the firm and coherent scientific view of reality. The opinion is widely held that both chance and miracle have been somehow rehabilitated, and that we have a right to believe (at our own risk, we are sometimes told) whatever makes us happy or helps us to be and feel good.
The educated man, especially if he has a scientific training, finds it very difficult to understand the apparent indifference to truth among the majority of believers, and the general readiness to believe the most grotesque superstitions. When we have seen a cultivated man turn pale with terror at finding himself one of thirteen at table, or have noticed that fashionable marriages almost cease in the month of May, in obedience to a pagan superstition the origin of which could be only guessed by Ovid two thousand years ago, we can no longer wonder at the severe tests which the Roman hierarchy thinks it safe to impose on the credulity of the faithful. We old Etonians are of course pleased that our founder, King Henry VI, is to be beatified; but it will surprise most of us to hear that that unfortunate monarch is credited with three hundred and sixtyeight miracles, of which twenty-three have been selected as absolutely proved, in order to warrant his beatification. But miracles are taken seriously enough in some parts of the Catholic world. Last year, when Etna was in eruption, the inhabitants of Linguaglossa took the staff of their patron saint Egidio and carried it in procession in front of the lava stream which was advancing toward their village. The people of Castiglione, hearing this, feared that the lava would be diverted in their own direction; so, having no wonderworking relic themselves, they marched against the men of Linguaglossa to stop them from performing their miracle. The combatants were separated by the carabinieri after some casualties had occurred.
These absurdities do not trouble the educated Catholic much. Coventry Patmore wrote in his copy of Matthew Arnold’s Literature and Dogma: ‘What’s the use of argufying? When all’s said, I take to the Catholic religion rather than to Atheism or Protestantism as I take to ale rather than to porter or half-and-half — because I like it better.’ But the question is whether this religion is likely to triumph over other forms of Christianity which at least make some attempt to come to terms with science and humanism.
IV
We may admit that the stability of Catholicism looks much more assured to-day than when Winckelmann wrote in 1768, from Rome, that before half a century had passed there would no longer be either a pope or a priest in the Eternal City.
We may also admit that in a country where the average mental age of an adult voter and breadwinner is about fourteen — and if this humiliating fact has been proved for the United States, it is unlikely that any European country could show a better record — the majority might easily be induced to believe in sporadic miracles, such as the split hailstones of Remiremont, stamped with the features of the Virgin, reported from France a few years before the Great War. But the whole trend of modern education and experience is strongly against supernatural phenomena. Even if the grandchildren of the present generation are somewhat less intelligent than their grandparents, they will be influenced by the cumulative effect of two more generations of scientific method, based on exact research.
There is now hardly any department of human industry which does not depend on the natural sciences. They are called in as a matter of course in every kind of manufacture and in all the operations of agriculture. The modern man lives in a world where scientific methods are constantly used, and where no irruption traceable to a supernatural agency is ever established. Magic and miracle have been wholly banished from his everyday experience; and it must become increasingly difficult for him to ‘believe heavily,’ as Renan said, that one particular religious corporation enjoys the privilege of upsetting, at frequent intervals, the ordinary course of nature. The theory of supernaturalistic dualism is so inwoven with Catholicism, it accounts for so much of its attractiveness, and it adds so much to its prestige and power of discipline, that it cannot be abandoned, though no doubt many educated Catholic laymen have practically discarded it. The Church itself utilizes the beliefs of the vulgar rather cynically, as in the instance of the miracleworking spring of La Salette, the fame of which began with an acknowledged hoax.
Another thing which is likely to tell adversely to the prospects of the Roman Church is the increasing difficulty of maintaining the monopolist claims on which its power largely rests. In a country like Spain it may be easy to attribute every enormity to the eretico, whom the populace seldom sees; but in America, where people of all religions and no religion rub shoulders every day, and where it is possible to form a fairly just estimate of a neighbor’s character, it must be impossible to divide the sheep from the goats by a denominational wall of partition. The modern Catholic is not fanatical enough to believe that all his decent-living Protestant neighbors are doomed to eternal torment. The Roman Church, especially since the Reformation, has been one among many branches of the Church of Christ, and everyone can see that this is its present position. This, however, is a position which the Roman Church can never afford to accept.
It seems probable that the monopoly claim will have to be tacitly abandoned in countries where Catholics and Protestants live side by side, and with it will go the spiritual arrogance which gives so much satisfaction to Catholics, as well as the power of intimidation which they at present use with great effect. The isolation and backwardness of purely Catholic nations are likely to diminish; and the progress of industrialization is unfavorable to Catholicism, though at least equally so to Protestantism.
The irreligion of the masses is a new, strange, and ominous phenomenon. For the first time in history the masses are not superstitious, and seem indifferent to the higher claims and consolations of religion. Wherever the poisonous influence of Karl Marx and his followers has penetrated, the proletariat is bitterly antichristian and antireligious. In England, and probably in America, the average workingman has a sincere reverence for Christ, combined with complete alienation from the Churches. His real religion is perhaps best expressed in such associations as the ‘Brotherhood,’ which flourishes in most of our urban centres. It is a religion without dogma, without church, and without eschatology. The only virtues which are highly valued are kindliness and courage, though temperance and chastity are inculcated; and the moral life is presented as loyalty to Jesus Christ. The Gospel is wholly secularized; the future hope which alone evokes enthusiasm is the hope of ‘a good time coming’ for their own class.
I can form no opinion as to whether this greatly reduced Christianity will continue to satisfy the masses. So long as it does, Catholicism is likely to be strongest in the country districts, and institutional Protestantism is not in a better position.
I therefore disbelieve entirely in a sweeping victory for Catholicism. It is in no danger of rapid decay. Its dignity and prestige, the beauty of its services and legends, the inward peace which follows complete submission to authority, and the delicate, hothouse type of piety which it fosters, will draw into it a thin but steady stream of converts. An interesting question, which I shall not attempt to answer, is whether in the new democracies, such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and Argentina, the centralized autocracy which is at present the government of the Roman Church will be able to hold its own. There might be a political disruption of the churches under the Roman obedience, without any great change in the character of the religion.
Just as Catholicism was the last creative achievement of antiquity, so the Reformation was the creation of the Middle Ages. It was not the creation of the Renaissance, which began in the Latin countries, and tended rather to undermine Christian ethics than to plant a new and more rigorously ethical form of Christianity. The Erasmian Reformation may come about in the future; the revolt of the sixteenth century took another form. Indeed, the contre-coup of the Reformation went far to dehumanize Catholicism, tightening its discipline and narrowing its scope. Arthur Clough, visiting Rome in the last century, asked indignantly how long ‘ these vile, tyrannous Spaniards’ were to lord it ‘in the country of Dante.’ The Reformation was primarily a rebellion of the Northern Europeans against a rapacious bureaucracy whose open immorality scandalized their moral sense as much as their rising consciousness of nationality was insulted by an alien domination over their purses and their consciences. But the Reformers did not see clearly what they wished to do. They achieved their spiritual independence, but left untouched whole blocks of the Catholic system, which were bound to give trouble afterward. Santayana is partly right in saying that the Northern races have not yet achieved a really native civilization. As compared with the more experienced and sophisticated Latins, the English and Americans are still half barbarians.
V
Protestantism, therefore, has not yet completely found itself. It thought that in cutting off the accretions of Mediterranean paganized Christianity it was returning to the original Gospel. To some extent the claim was true; but just as Southern Europe paganized the Gospel, so the North barbarized it, mixing it with an element which certainly never came from Judæa — the Nordic code of chivalry and honor. In some ways, though not in others, Protestantism is further from Galilee than even Roman Catholicism.
The Gospel, as Santayana says, is unworldly, disenchanted, ascetic; it treats ecclesiastical establishments with tolerant contempt; it regards prosperity as a danger, earthly ties as a burden, Sabbaths as a superstition; it is democratic and antinomian; it loves contemplation, poverty, and solitude; it meets sinners with sympathy, but puritans with biting scorn. Protestantism, on the other hand, — in its most characteristic form, Calvinism, — is convinced of the importance of success; it abominates what is disreputable; contemplation seems to it idleness, solitude selfishness, and poverty a sort of dishonorable punishment. It lacks the notes of humility, disillusion, and detachment. It is the religion of a healthy child, with pure but unchastened energies.
Protestantism is at present suffering from two causes of weakness, very unlike each other. The first is the collapse of the bibliolatry which used to be one of its chief buttresses. ‘The Bible,’ said Chillingworth, ‘is the religion of Protestants.’ The old uncritical acceptance of every verse of the Old and New Testaments as equally oracular and infallible has become utterly impossible. It could not survive even the first assaults of scholarship and critical method. But this blow has really been a blessing in disguise. For the theory of verbal inspiration not only was untenable; it committed those who held it to an irreconcilable conflict with natural science, and sometimes, as in the notorious case of witchcraft, it led the Protestant Churches into crimes from which their whole attitude toward God and man ought to have saved them. Bibliolatry has been a millstone round the neck of Protestantism, cramping its freedom and depressing its intellectual energies. The strange thing is that, as we can now see plainly, it has not and never has had any essential connection with the principles of the Reformation. The infallible Book was set up as a make weight to the infallible Church, because some external and incontrovertible authority seemed to be needed in the struggle against Rome. But the Bible has never really been the religion of Protestants. The seat of authority in religion is for them the inner light, the inspiration of the individual. Mysticism, as Troeltsch says, stands for the first time on its own feet in Protestantism.
It is of course true that the claim to personal inspiration leads to great absurdities if we forget that the Spirit of God speaks in others also, and perhaps in a special sense to the Church in a corporate capacity; but no vagaries of fanatical or unbalanced visionaries alter the fact that for the Protestant the conscience and spiritual experience of the individual are the foundation of faith and morals. This is being more fully recognized in our time than ever before. The centre of gravity in religion has shifted from authority to experience, and the battle between faith and unbelief has completely changed its ground. When this is recognized the fundamental strength of Protestantism will be understood; though, if we may venture to prophesy, it will be the stepchildren of the Reformation, and especially the Quakers, rather than the great Reformed Churches, which will show increased strength and confidence.
The other reason for the depressed condition of Protestantism is the decay of the old Puritan discipline. Calvinism is Christianized Stoicism; it has the same moral strength and the same emotional hardness which showed themselves in the disciples of Zeno. But Calvinism instituted a peculiar kind of asceticism which it put in the place of the disciplinary exercises of the Catholic Church. A man’s work in the world was to be the field of his self-denial and his self-discipline. The typically godly life was to be a life not of withdrawal from the world and its activities, but the conscientious and laborious performance of some branch of industry. It has sometimes been said that Calvinism created the type of the modern business-man. It should, however, be remembered that Calvin condemned avarice and usury, and also the manufacture of things which only subserve the gratifications of the world and the flesh. With this caution, he did encourage Christians to devote their lives to some productive industry, and it is not altogether a caricature to say that the advice of Calvinism is, ‘Make and do something concrete and tangible — it does not matter much what it is.’
It is not necessary to remind American readers how large a part this teaching has occupied in the American ideal of good citizenship. It still exists in America, and in Scotland. But the divorce between religion and business is now almost complete. The progress of industrialism has removed the employer more and more from the actual and personal manufacture of commodities; the largest fortunes are made by men who know little or nothing of the crafts from which they derive their wealth; the old simplicity of life and the old scrupulousness are no longer easy to find. The great industrial machine grinds out results which are so unsatisfactory to our sense of justice that books like Samuel Smiles on Self-Help, popular half a century ago, arouse only bitter merriment. The ethics of money-making, without Puritanism, are not Christian.
Can we hope for a return to this, the best side of Calvinism, a recognition of the dignity and sacredness of work, as the chief means by which we may serve God in our generation? The decay of this conviction is notorious. Work is now regarded as an evil and a curse, or at best only a means of procuring the pleasures of idleness. There is even a perverted class-morality among the handworkers which prevents them from doing their best for their employers. I can see no signs of any improvement in this respect. In England the new attitude toward work threatens the final extinction of our national prosperity, already cruelly crippled by the war and by the defalcation of our foreign debtors. We can only say that any country in which a revival of Puritanism takes place will reap a rich material as well as moral reward.
VI
Ecclesiastics are apt to be pessimistic about the future of religion, and as far as the prosperity of church corporations is concerned their discouragement is probably justified. Church life is centred in the Sunday services, and these, we must admit, do not attract even the seriously minded among the younger generation. Nor can we wonder at this, when we consider the antiquated forms of our liturgies, and the poor quality of the average sermon. But there is a great deal of diffused religious feeling and conviction in the Western nations, which may yet find some corporate expression. Protestantism has long been feeling its way toward a complete reconciliation with humanism and science, a religion of personal conviction based on conscience, reason, and spiritual communion with God. In seeking this the spirit of Protestantism is seeking to realize, for the first time, its own fundamental principles. In our more hopeful moods we may look forward to a new Reformation, which shall embody the best part of the Renaissance tradition, which can be traced back, across the long night of the Dark Ages, to the enlightened Christian philosophy of Alexandria, and to Saint Paul and the Johannine books of the New Testament. We may even say that it has a still longer ancestry, being the spiritual heir of eight hundred years of Greek philosophy, during the longest period of unfettered thought which the human race has yet been permitted to enjoy.
Our main hopes, I think, must rest on the possibility of this new, Erasmian Reformation; and there is enough in the present situation to make such hopes reasonable. The popularity of writers like Eucken, who insist on the independence of the spiritual life and the futility of mere revivals of old types, is a sign that this appeal meets with a large and generous response in our time.
Eucken tells us that in trying to ascertain the intrinsic truth of religion we may take our stand on the summit of its development. ‘Our problem begins only when religion engenders a world of its own, and holds forth such a world over against the remainder of existence, thus transforming the remaining world through and through. Religion holds before man an invisible order of things, an eternal existence, a supernatural life, and claims his soul for all this. . . . It is a belief in the indwelling of a Divine in human nature — of the living presence of an eternal and spiritual energy in the deeds of man.’ ‘The world of spirit has in Christianity acquired a personal embodiment and an overwhelming clearness.’ ‘It has planted the fundamental conviction of Platonism of the existence of an eternal order among a great portion of the human race, and has given a mighty impetus to all effort. It has also brought back the eternal into time, and has for the first time proposed to mankind and to each individual a fundamental inner renewal.’ He concludes by saying: ‘If Protestantism is to remain true to its main idea, it must subjugate history to personal life, and this means a radical transformation of the traditional material.’
But we must take account of certain political possibilities, which may upset all predictions. Here the position of America is very different from that of Europe. America is now more secure against foreign aggression than any nation in history. No coalition could endanger her independence. Such clouds as may be visible on the horizon are only domestic and social troubles. Whether this security and the enormous prosperity which will accompany it are favorable to religion, may well be doubted. Jeshurun waxed fat, and kicked. But America need not fear the devastating calamities which may overwhelm Europe. The revival of Napoleonism in France, to which Americans seem to shut their eyes, points straight to another European war in the near future; and such a war would leave civilization stricken to death. It is impossible to say what the religion of a dying continent would be like.
There is another possibility, a clanger which seems to some observers more menacing than it does to myself. The international forces of revolution may threaten the forces of law and order in civilized countries. If this peril were felt to be imminent, there would undoubtedly be a movement to seek refuge under the other International — the Black International, as it is sometimes called. The Church of Rome might become the rallyingground of all who wished to preserve the treasures and traditions of civilization against a cataclysm of frenzied savagery. The revolution would attack the Church, as it has done in Russia, partly as the custodian of the three primitive instincts, — religion, the family, and private property,— which, as history shows, stand very closely together, and partly because the Church is a formidable enemy of all tyranny that has not come to terms with itself. The priests would suffer martyrdom with the invincible courage which they always display under persecution; and the Church would become the centre of a resistance which, if victorious, would leave Romanism with an immensely enhanced prestige. But I do not think the Communists will overturn the social order. The object lesson of Russia has not been lost on the world. The dictatorship of the proletariat has ended in the tyranny of an infamous gang of homicidal maniacs. After a time, history seems to show, the blood-lust spends itself, and the terrified populace implores the protection of some ambitious soldier.
It is possible that in part of Europe there will be a revival of military monarchy in alliance with the Church — the type of government called Cæsaropapism. We must not assume that constitutional experiments which are at present discredited will never be renewed. The suspicion that democracy has been tried and has failed is widely held in Europe, and seems to be growing. One nation after another is reverting to the rule of a single man. But the Church could no longer give the monarchy the amount of support which it gave in the Middle Ages, and it does not seem likely that even an autocratic government would think it necessary or prudent to give much power to priests.
To conclude. There are some discoveries or revelations on which the human race does not go back. Of these the Christian religion is one, and modern science is another. Both have permanently enriched mankind, and it is almost inconceivable that either of them should disappear. They will have somehow to be reconciled; and I agree with Eucken that traditional Christianity will have to be drastically revised. Whether the new form of Christianity will accept or reject the name of Protestant does not much matter. It will belong, I think, to the Platonic and humanist type, which has always existed in the Church. It will be entirely independent of Rome, and will not conform to the articles of belief of any of the great Reformed Churches. But it will accept the moral teaching of the New Testament, and its devotional life will continue to have its centre in the idea of the indwelling of Christ.