time: the refreshing river 



perpetuation of a class supremacy and privilege, the regimentation of 

 a mass of helots for the upkeep of a veneer of oligarchic culture? 

 The scientist, as administrator, can make administration more efficient. 

 He cannot take away from humanity the duty of facing up to the 

 fundamental moral principles. He cannot relieve humanity of the 

 fundamental moral choice. Only by political action can moral choices 

 be implemented and political history made. 



Science must be set apart from all other beliefs as possessing a 

 peculiar holiness, wrote Polanyi in the passage quoted above. The 

 word "holiness" here is really significant. To the court of religion he 

 has appealed, to the court of religion he shall go. 



In one of the most brilliant discussions of the history of religious 

 ideas known to me, John Lewis described in some detail how through- 

 out the history of Jewish and christian theology there has been 

 unceasing strife between the sacred and the secular.^ Prophets arise to 

 castigate the shortcomings of the social life of the people, to menace 

 the wealthy exploiters with divine wrath; to demand restitution of 

 property robbed from the workers, the fatherless and the widows; 

 and to turn the financiers out of the Temple with a whip of short 

 cords. But repentance is soon over, the existing economic processes 

 resume their sway, and the religious ideas of love and equity, never 

 wholly lost, are stored up in churches under the guardianship of 

 priests. "Religious emotion," wrote Marx,^ "is, on the one hand, the 

 expression of actual misery, and on the other, a protest against actual 

 misery. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the kindliness 

 of a heartless world, the spirit of unspiritual conditions. It is the 

 people's opium. The removal of religion as the illusory happiness of 

 the people is the demand for its real happiness. The demand that it 

 should give up illusions about its real conditions is the demand that 

 it should give up the conditions which make illusions necessary. 

 Criticism of religion is therefore at heart a criticism of the vale of 

 misery for which religion is the promised vision." 



Criticism of the vale of misery, carried through to its ultimate 

 point, becomes the demand for a thorough renewal and reconstruction 

 of society in the interests of rationality and love, interests which 

 cannot rule under the system of exploitation of man by man in social 

 classes. When once ownership of the means of production and of all 



^ "Communism the Heir to the Christian Tradition" in Christianity and the Social 

 Revolution (London, 1935). 



^ Introduction to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law. 



118 



