SCIENCE, RELIGION AND SOCIALISM 



suddenly dies or is killed. The question then reduces itself to a matter 

 of taste; shall we bury him with unloving haste and a callous reference 

 to the unimportance of the individual? Or shall we remember, as 

 we fulfil the rites of a liturgical requiem, that this is the common 

 end of all the sons of men, and so unite ourselves with the blessed 

 company of all faithful people, those who earnestly looked and worked 

 in their generation for the coming of the Kingdom ? It is true indeed, 

 as Merejkovsky has said, that whether we believe in Christ or not, 

 we must certainly suffer with him. And, indeed, it is my opinion 

 that if the ancient christian modes of satisfying this numinous sense 

 are discontinued (Eliot's ""vieilles usines disaffectis*'), other liturgical 

 forms will be devised to play their part in attempting to express that 

 which cannot be expressed. This we already see in such cases as the 

 tomb of Lenin himself, and the Red Corners. 



In the Timiriazev Institute at Moscow I examined the red banner 

 which the scientists there were accustomed to carry on May Day and 

 other public occasions. It was of a velvety cloth with yellow fringes 

 and an elaborate hammer and sickle. How tawdry some of our re- 

 spectable middle class people in England would have thought it. 

 How they despise the native decorations and pictures on British 

 Trade Union banners on the rare occasions when these pass through 

 the streets in the light of day. But to me it was quite clearly numinous, 

 one with the cross of our salvation and the Vexilla Regis indeed, 

 conspicuous in the vanguard of humanity moving from the captivity 

 of necessity into the glorious liberty of the children of God. But 

 is this process ever complete? Are we not all for ever in bondage to 

 space-time? Is not this bondage our final evil? It is absurd to say 

 that "with the denial of an objective creator, socialism forgets the 

 problem of evil." Certainly no "person" is now responsible, but in 

 whatever society man arranges himself he must take up some attitude 

 towards the universe, and to the fate of individuals in it, and in this 

 attitude, the sense of the holy will always be an element. 



Scientific Opium. 



Not to be awake to the iniquity of class oppression, then, is religious 

 opium. Scientific opium would mean not being awake to the tragic 

 side of life, to the numinous elements of the VN'orld and of human 

 effort in the world, to religious worship. Scientific opium has often 

 been thought an integral part of marxism by its opponents, but for 

 us the question is what break with tradition the contribution of 



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