Towards the Great Peace | Page 9

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 are preceding those wherein all things are made new, and the next two generations will see, not alone the passing of what we may call modernism, since it is our own age, but the prologue of the epoch that is to come. It is for us to say what this shall be. It is not foreordained; true, if we will it, it may