SCIENCE, RELIGION AND SOCIALISM 



Few would wish to maintain to-day that the organised religion of 

 Christianity has any gift of temporal immortality, and that it will not 

 find its end just as the religions of ancient Egypt, or of Mexico, found 

 theirs. But some would certainly wish to maintain that religion, as a 

 natural department of the human spirit, has survived these changes 

 and will always survive them. It could also be held that no historic 

 religious system has failed to contribute some element of advance to 

 man's social consciousness. The hope of making religion philo- 

 sophically respectable is probably quite vain, and the sense of the 

 holy in its ancient form cannot flourish in pure isolation away from 

 its ancient trellis. But will not christian feeling be succeeded by 

 another form of numinous feeling; a new development of social 

 emotions? Even to ask this question is to ask where it could come 

 from. We may be certain that it will not come from the lecture-rooms 

 of academic philosophy, still less from the armchairs of literary 

 critics or the speculations of scientific workers interested in religion 

 from the outside. Will it not come from the factory? Obviously not 

 the factory as we know it to-day, but the factory of the future, the 

 factory of co-operating producers, when the whole system of com- 

 mercial exploitation has been completely destroyed, and the means of 

 production have been taken over in communal ownership. The most 

 appalling struggles may well be involved in the death-throes of the 

 present system, and we may perhaps expect that the numinous feeling 

 of the future will take its origin from the consequent stress and strain. 

 Is not Mayakovsky's poetry, are not the "Twelve" of Alexander Blok, 

 the symbols of this ? But meanwhile. Religion is still resident in her 

 traditional house, and those who would seek her successfully must 

 seek her there as well as in the leaflet distribution and the Trade 

 Union Hall. Auden's words express what is going on; — 



"Love, loath to enter 

 The suffering winter, 

 Still willing to rejoice 

 With the unbroken voice 

 At the precocious charm 

 Blithe in the dream 

 Afraid to wake, afraid 

 To doubt one term 

 Of summer's perfect fraud, 

 Enter and suflFer 

 Within the quarrel 



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