we may be disposed to think
that these millions who no longer attend church retain in their minds
the beliefs of their fathers, the slender circulation of religious
literature makes it plain that the vast majority of them do not, in
point of fact, receive either the spoken or written message of the
Christian Church. In the great cities--and it is undoubted that the life
of a nation is mainly controlled by its cities--there has been an
increasing reluctance to listen to the authoritative exponents of the
Christian gospel.

A number of the clergy have very naturally noticed and stressed this
coincidence. Prelates of high authority have, as we shall see, even
declared that the war is a scourge deliberately laid on the back of
mankind by the Almighty on account of this spreading infidelity. As a
rule, the clergy shrink from advocating a theory which has such grave
implications as this has, and they are content to submit the more
plausible suggestion, that the decay of the Christian standard of
conduct in the mind of a large proportion of our generation accounts for
this tragic combat of nations. A distinguished Positivist writer, Mr. J.
Cotter Morison, commenting in the last generation on the decay of
Christian belief, expressed some such concern in the following terms:

"It would be rash to expect that a transition, unprecedented for
its width and difficulty, from theology to positivism, from the
service of God to the service of Man, could be accomplished without
jeopardy. Signs are not wanting that the prevalent anarchy in
thought is leading to anarchy in morals. Numbers who have put off
belief in God have not put on belief in Humanity. A common and
lofty standard of duty is being trampled down in the fierce battle
of incompatible principles."[1]

It is true that in the work from which I quote[1] the learned, if
somewhat nervous, Positivist does not, by his masterly survey of the
moral history of Europe, afford us the least reason to think that we
have really deteriorated from the standard of conduct set us by earlier
generations, but his words do tend to press on our notice the claim of
many writers, clerical and non-clerical, that we are returning from
Christianity to Paganism, from a settled moral discipline to an
unhealthy moral scepticism. Can one entirely and safely reconstruct the
bases of personal and national conduct in one or two generations?

This very plain and plaus