26 WILL CHRISTIANITY SURVIVE THE WAR? 



Now, if we are to get any good at all out of the immense 

 coil of the war, we must endeavour to have a more united 

 people. We must drop our petty differences, and continue 

 to work together for the common good in the way that we 

 are now doing under the binding power of a common danger 

 and a common misfortune. We must have no more of these 

 artificial divisions caused by mutually destructive dogmas. 

 If the Churches are to survive, they must drop their theology 

 and concentrate on good works ; and as for the priesthood, 

 that monstrous body of mostly excellent and well-meaning 

 men who waste their time and stultify their intellects by 

 theological exercises in which they expound their own 

 impossible dogmas and controvert others equally impos- 

 sible, can they not be merged in the general community, 

 and not remain a race apart, despised by men and unwhole- 

 somely coddled by women ? If they want to serve their 

 fellow creatures and they mostly do let them give up 

 theology, the Science of God, of which they know nothing 

 and never can know anything, and become humble students 

 of the real Science of Man and the world he lives in, of 

 which they can already know a great deal, and of which the 

 knowledge is always growing. On this knowledge depends 

 the progress of the world. 



VI 

 BY PROF. J. B. BURY, LITT.D., LL.D. 



No one is likely to dispute the proposition that every tissue 

 of our social fabrics will be affected by the convulsion which 

 is now shaking the world. In the sphere of religion it is 

 not daring to indicate as a probable result that the conflict 

 between reason and tradition, freedom and authority, will 

 pass into an acuter and intenser phase. We need not be 

 surprised nor need we be alarmed in case reactionary forces 

 should at first appear to gain ground. A hundred years 

 ago, after the last great European conflagration, ecclesiastical 

 powers rallied their hosts with imposing vigour and success. 

 For a time the work of eighteenth-century thinkers seemed 

 to be in danger, and the wave of revolutionary thought 

 stemmed by the repaired dikes of obscurantism. The success 

 was superficial. It did not avail to stay the steady advance 



