ence should still
survive, that it should not yet have been swept out of existence by
the outraged common-sense and good feeling of Humanity, is a proof of
the immense indifference with which the Western world, absorbed as it
is in secular pursuits, regards religion.

It may indeed be doubted if men have ever been so non-religious as
are at the present day the inhabitants of our highly-civilised and
thoroughly-Christianised West. At any rate the absence of a central
aim in human life has never been so complete as it is now. Most men
are content to drift through life, toiling for the daily bread which
will enable them to go on living, yet neither knowing nor caring to
know why they are alive. There is a minority of stronger and more
resolute men who devote life with unwavering energy to the pursuit of
what I may call private and personal ends. Thus the man of business
lives for the acquisition of riches; the scholar and the scientist,
of knowledge; the statesman, of power; the speculator, of excitement;
the libertine, of pleasure; and so forth. Few are they who ever
dream of devoting life as a whole to the pursuit of an end which is
potentially attainable by all men, and which is therefore worthy of
Man as Man. The idea of there being such an end has indeed been
almost wholly lost sight of. Those among us who are of larger
discourse than the rest and less absorbed by personal aims, ask
themselves mournfully: What is the meaning of life? Why are we here?
Is life worth living? and other such questions; and being unable to
answer them to their satisfaction, or get them answered, resign
themselves to a state of quasi-stoical endurance. That religion
cannot be expected to answer these questions--the very questions
which it is its right and its duty to answer--seems to be taken for
granted by all who ask them. Religion, as it is now conceived of,
is a thing for priests and ministers, for churches and chapels, for
Sundays and Saints'-days, for the private devotions of women and
children, for educational debates in Parliament, for the first lesson
on the time-table (9.5 to 9.45 a.m.) of a Public Elementary School.
The "unbeliever" is eager to run a tilt against religion. The
"non-believer" is content to ignore it. The "believer" is careful to
exclude it from nine-tenths of his life. It is to this pass that the
gospel of salvation by machinery has brought the most "progressive"
part of the human race.

The phase of non-religio