WILL CHRISTIANITY SURVIVE THE WAR? 37 



set them upon inquiring as to its truth ; and that is of all 

 activities the one most fatal to religious belief. What the 

 more prudent champions of faith are bent on doing is, as 

 usual, to maintain a belief in its utility. I have always 

 regarded it is a clear proof of John Mill's non-comprehension 

 of religious history that he could affirm that the utility plea 

 had been seldom employed in religious controversy. It has 

 always been employed ; and to-day it is far more in evidence 

 than any other. I have just read an interesting essay by an 

 advanced Unitarian preacher, in which it is candidly avowed 

 that the religion of the past, built on the cosmology of the 

 savage, is quite inadequate to the tests of the modern intelli- 

 gence. In effect, he admitted that it is false. What he 

 pleaded for was not a straightforward resort to truth-telling, 

 but a new manipulation in which some kind of God should 

 be more plausibly presented. Atheism, he alleged, had 

 frequently been " tried," and found inadequate to human 

 needs an untruth as gross in its way as any in Hebrew 

 cosmology or legend ; and it was on that comprehensive 

 fiction that he rested his faith in the future of his own 

 intangible and elusive creed. Doubtless he will continue 

 to find a congregation. But if the war has strengthened 

 any purely intellectual conviction, it is probably the belief 

 in scientific solidity of thinking, whether as regards munitions 

 or anything else ; and it seems at least improbable that an 

 indurated trust in accuracy and reasoned action will continue 

 to be found easily compatible with the general reliance on 

 myth, fable, miracle, prayer, and a doctrine of salvation by 

 surrogate sacrifice. 



It is, indeed, notorious that men are slow to apply to 

 matters of creed the tests of coherence and credibility which 

 they rigorously bring to bear on every " business proposi- 

 tion." The banker who will mercilessly analyse the pro- 

 spectus or balance-sheet on which he is asked to lend money 

 will often take on trust promises of a future life adapted to the 

 consumption of the ancient Britons ; and the engineer, whose 

 business is conducted with the strictest eye to dovetailing and 

 detail, will still listen reverently on Sundays to reasoning 

 upon the like of which no man could run a wheelbarrow. 

 Even among the men of science, the "chemically clean" 

 specialist may live in an intellectual dustbin. The other day 

 we had a presidential protest against British apathy to science 

 and research from Sir Arthur Evans, who is so admirably 

 scientific as an archaeologist, and who complacently presents 



