onstrated that the Isidorian
Decretals were a forgery, or the correspondence of Paul and Seneca a
pious fraud, or that the mediaeval belief in witchcraft was the product
of physical ignorance and superstition.'

'You say,' he wrote again, in another connection, to Armitstead from
Milan, 'you say you think my later letters have been far too aggressive
and positive. I, too, am astonished at myself. I do not know my own
mood, it is so clear, so sharp, so combative. Is it the spectacle of
Italy, I wonder--of a country practically without religion--the
spectacle in fact of Latin Europe as a whole, and the practical Atheism
in which it is ingulfed? My dear friend, the problem of the world at
this moment is--_how to find a religion?_--some great conception which
shall be once more capable, as the old were capable, of welding
societies, and keeping man's brutish elements in check. Surely
Christianity of the traditional sort is failing everywhere--less
obviously with us, and in Teutonic Europe generally, but egregiously,
notoriously, in all the Catholic countries. We talk complacently of the
decline of Buddhism. But what have we to say of the decline of
Christianity? And yet this last is infinitely more striking and more
tragic, inasmuch as it affects a more important section of mankind. I,
at any rate, am not one of those who would seek to minimise the results
of this decline for human life, nor can I bring myself to believe that
Positivism or "evolutional morality" will ever satisfy the race.

'In the period of social struggle which undeniably lies before us, both
in the old and the new world, are we then to witness a war of classes,
unsoftened by the ideal hopes, the ideal law, of faith? It looks like
it. What does the artisan class, what does the town democracy throughout
Europe, care any longer for Christian checks or Christian sanctions as
they have been taught to understand them? Superstition, in certain parts
of rural Europe, there is in plenty, but wherever you get intelligence
and therefore movement, you get at once either indifference to, or a
passionate break with, Christianity. And consider what it means, what it
will mean, this Atheism of the great democracies which are to be our
masters! The world has never seen anything like it; such spiritual
anarchy and poverty combined with such material power and resource.
Every society--Christian and non-Christian--has always till now had its
ideal, of greater or less ethic