36 WILL CHRISTIANITY SURVIVE THE WAR? 



War. The Jewish religion, which is a main part of the 

 basis of the Christian, was developed not in an age of 

 national success, but mainly in periods of captivity, sub- 

 jection, and oppression. It is true that large bodies of the 

 Hebrews simply deserted the religion under which their 

 State had been brought to ruin, and became absorbed in the 

 population of Babylon ; but it was the devotees, there and at 

 Jerusalem, who built up the historic religion of Jehovah. In 

 seventeenth-century Germany, again, a religious revival took 

 place after the ruinous Thirty Years' War ; and the Stillen 

 im Lande, the Quietists, prepared a soil for the new Pietism 

 of a later generation a more religious phenomenon, by 

 common consent, than the rabid temper of theological feud 

 which had raged through Germany for a hundred years 

 after Luther. Similarly, it was in the period of defeat and 

 collapse of the Moslem cause in Spain that Mohammedan 

 faith revived and the Moorish freethinking of the Middle 

 Ages died out. Religion, in short, seems to flourish more 

 in adversity than in prosperity; though there is always the 

 countervailing factor of revolt from religion on the part of 

 those who have clearly realized its futility as a check to 

 either moral or physical evil. 



Beyond such reasoning from analogy, however, it would 

 be scientifically unsafe to go ; and no critical Rationalist will 

 commit himself to predictions. That faith, as contrasted 

 with the critical spirit, is fostered by decadence is broadly 

 true. But in the civilization of modern Europe, which is so 

 much more complex than that of all previous centuries down 

 to the eighteenth, and is so constantly conditioned by inter- 

 national reactions, there can be no certainty that any of the 

 old developments above noted will be repeated. Culture 

 to-day is a much less destructible thing than it was in the 

 past, whatever may be the case as regards Kultur. Even in 

 Germany, then, the theocratic and State-Christian creed of 

 the moment may fail to maintain itself in the state of peace ; 

 and it is very doubtful whether the substantially non-Christian 

 Socialist movement will be swallowed up by any revival of 

 mere evangelicalism. Unless German civilization is to retro- 

 grade in every way as it has morally retrograded during the 

 past fifty years, Christianity there is likely to prove insalvable 

 even by adversity. 



As for Britain, the prognosis, as aforesaid, is clearly 

 unfavourable. If war really moves men to take a new 

 interest in the "essentials" of religion, it will ipso facto 



