io RELIGION AFTER THE WAR 



interestingly at a finite God) ; but never again, I think, will 

 any guess have the authority of the great guesses of the past 

 guesses among which Christianity, though not the worst, 

 is assuredly far from being the most sublime. It is impossible 

 to foretell the vicissitudes of the Christian religion between 

 the present time and the time when it will be definitely 

 enclosed with its forerunners in the museum of history. One 

 thing about it may, however, with all due diffidence, be 

 announced as probable. The Christian churches, feeling 

 more and more the acuteness of their material danger, will 

 unite. In their strength they divided. In their weakness 

 they will come together. The movement towards unison and 

 union has already been initiated. Nonconformists are already 

 more interested in amalgamation than in anything else. 

 They seem to regard it as the cure for all their infirmities, 

 even for their increasing inability to produce a satisfactory 

 annual crop of preachers. And one wing of the Established 

 Church is nearly ripe to fall back into the lap of the church 

 from which it seceded. Such tendencies will no doubt be 

 the leading features in the history of dogmatic supernatural 

 religion after the war. 



To a certain type of mind and that not the least honest 

 this outlook upon a future from which the support of the 

 "divinely revealed " has been absolutely withdrawn will seem 

 dark and bleak. Yet why should it seem so? If it is impos- 

 sible to conceive that henceforward any " revelation " can win 

 the allegiance of those higher intelligences without whose 

 concurrence no new dogmatic supernatural religion could 

 really take root and it is impossible why be afraid or even 

 distressed? There remains for us, more than ever, in the 

 words of that writer of genius, D. H. Lawrence, 



The terrible ecstasy of the consciousness that I am life. 



There remains also for us the consciousness, into which 

 we have yet by no means fully entered, that we are living in 

 a transcendent epoch in the evolution of human progress. 

 The significance of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is 

 that we have cast off the greatest illusion that man's weakness 

 in the face of the mysterious universe ever invented for his 

 own reassurance. The illusion was that any consideration 

 can be more important than loyalty to humanly ascertained 

 truth. And the fact that we have cast it off is a sufficient 

 proof that we have acquired strength to do without it. The 

 step has been tremendous so tremendous that the fall of 

 Christianity itself is a mere episode in it. Probably not for 



