Towards the Great Peace | Page 9

than happened in the
case of those who had no such experience of the deep brutality of the
regime of post-Renaissance society.
True as this is, it is also true that for one who won through there were
many who gained nothing, and it was, and is, the sheer weight of
numbers of those who failed of this that has made their influence on the
modern life as pervasive and controlling as it is.
What has happened is a certain degradation of character, a weakening
of the moral stamina of men, and against this no mechanical device in
government, no philosophical or social theory, can stand a chance of
successful resistance, while material progress in wealth and trade and
scientific achievement becomes simply a contributory force in the
process of degeneration. For this degradation of character we are bound
to hold this new social force in a measure responsible, even though it
has so operated because of its inherent qualities and in no material
respect through conscious cynicism or viciousness; indeed it is safe to
say that in so far as it was acting consciously it was with good motives,
which adds an element of even greater tragedy to a situation already
sufficiently depressing.
If I am right in holding this to be the effective cause of the situation we
have now to meet, it is true that it is by no means the only one. The
emancipation and deliverance of the downtrodden masses of men who
owed their evil estate to the destruction of the Christian society of the
Middle Ages, was a clamourous necessity; it was a slavery as bad in
some ways as any that had existed in antiquity, and the number of its
victims was greater. The ill results of the accomplished fact was largely
due to the condition of religion which existed during the period of
emancipation. No society can endure without vital religion, and any
revolution effected at a time when religion is moribund or dissipated in
contentious fragments, is destined to be evacuated of its ideals and its
potential, and to end in disaster. Now the freeing of the slaves of the
Renaissance and the post-Reformation, and their absorption in the body
politic, was one of the greatest revolutions in history, and it came at a
time when religion, which had been one and vital throughout Western
Europe for six centuries, had been shattered and nullified, and its place
taken, in the lands that saw the great liberation, by Calvinism,
Lutheranism, Puritanism and atheism, none of which could exert a

guiding and redemptive influence on the dazed hordes that had at last
come up into the light of day.
In point of fact, therefore, we are bound to trace back the responsibility
for the present crisis even to the Reformation itself, as well as to the
tyranny and absolutism of government, and the sordid and profligate
ordering of society, which followed on the end of Mediaevalism.
So then we stand today confronting a situation that is ominous and
obscure, since the very ideals and devices which we had held were the
last word in progressive evolution have failed at the crisis, and because
we who created them and have worked through them, have failed in
character, and chiefly because we have accepted low ideals and inferior
standards imposed upon us by social elements betrayed and abandoned
by a world that could not aid them or assimilate them since itself had
betrayed the only thing that could give them force, unity and coherency,
that is, a vital and pervasive religious faith.
There are those who hold our case to be desperate, to whom the
disillusionment of peace, after the high optimism engendered by the
vast heroism and the exalted ideals instigated by the war, has brought
nothing but a mood of deep pessimism. The sentiment is perhaps
natural, but it is none the less both irrational and wicked. If it is
persisted in, if it becomes widespread, it may perfectly well justify
itself, but only so. We no longer accept the Calvinistic doctrine of
predestination, we believe, and must highly believe, that our fate is of
our own making, for Christianity has made us the heirs of free-will.
What we will that shall we be, or rather, what we are that shall we will,
and if we make of ourselves what, by the grace of God, we may, then
the victory rests with us. It is true that we are in the last years of a
definite period, on that decline that precedes the opening of a new
epoch. Never in history has any such period overpassed its limit of five
hundred years, and ours, which came to birth in the last half of the
fifteenth century, cannot outlast the present. But these declining years