OP THE WAR ON RELIGIOUS LIFE IN GREAT BRITAIN. 187 



To many Christians Christianity itself is an accident of time 

 and place. They are Christians because they were born in a 

 Christian country; because they were educated in Christian 

 homes and schools ; because they have never been compelled to 

 make a choice between the Christian and other religions, or 

 even between one Christian Church and other Christian Churches. 

 Sometimes it is argued that people find themselves, by their 

 birth or education, members of a particular Church, and that, 

 where God has set them, they are justified in remaining, if they 

 are not indeed bound there to remain. Belief is comparatively 

 easy, so long as it is not confronted by other beliefs or by 

 negations. But it tends to become more difficult as soon as it 

 is known to be contradicted. A person who spends his life in 

 a rural village may spend it more happily and peacefully than 

 in a great city. For every man is strengthened in his belief, 

 whether political or religious, so long as he lives among people 

 who agree with him. He is, or is apt to be, weakened in such 

 measure as he is brought into contact with disagreement. 

 Accordingly, experience may, and often does, make him more 

 tolerant and more charitable, but it does not make him more 

 firmly convinced of his own opinions. 



It is probable, then, that one reason of the laxity or flexibility 

 in religion during the last half century has lain in the familiarity 

 of men and women with such ways of thought, of habit and of 

 worship as were unknown to any earlier generation. The 

 means of locomotion and of information, as they have brought 

 the nations of the world more closely together, have, in some 

 degree, impaired the force of national character and of 

 individual faith. Travellers, who have known the life of 

 Mohammedan and pagan nations, have realized the possibility 

 - of a civilization widely different from the Christian ; and this 

 civilization may have seemed to them, at least in some aspects — 

 as in temperance among orthodox Mohammedans — to be 

 superior to Christian civilization. But foreign travel upon a 

 large scale has, until recently, been the exclusive privilege of 

 the rich, and consequently of the few. Never, I think, in 

 English history, until the outbreak of the present war, except 

 perhaps in the case of the British Army in India, have a large 

 number of citizens been transplanted from their homes in 

 Great Britain to countries where every, or nearly every, usage 

 must have given an abrupt shock to their own prejudices and 

 prepossessions. Private soldiers who have served, not only in 

 India, but in Egypt, in the Dardanelles, and in Africa, cannot 

 have failed to be deeply impressed by their contact with the 



