the other increases and grows stronger in its struggle against the
unknown."[14]

Joseph Dietzgen has thus stated what may be called the law of the
atrophy of religion: "The more the idea of God recedes into the past the
more palpable it is; in olden times man knew everything about his God;
the more modern the form of religion has become, the more confused and
hazy are our religious ideas. The truth is that the historic
development of religion tends to its gradual dissolution."[15]

The characteristic attitude of the socialist materialist toward
Christianity appears very clearly in the following excerpt from
Professor Ferri's "Socialism and Modern Science":

"It is true that Marxian Socialism, since the Congress held at Erfurt
(1891), has rightly declared that religious beliefs are private
affairs[16] and that, therefore, the Socialist party combats religious
intolerance under all its forms.... But this breadth of superiority of
view is, at bottom, only a consequence of the confidence in final
victory.

"It is because Socialism knows and foresees that religious beliefs,
whether one regards them, with Sergi, as pathological phenomena of human
psychology, or as useless phenomena of moral incrustation, are destined
to perish by atrophy with the extension of even elementary scientific
culture. This is why Socialism does not feel the necessity of waging a
special warfare against these religious beliefs which are destined to
disappear. It has assumed this attitude, although it knows that the
absence or the impairment of the belief in God is one of the most
powerful factors for its extension, because the priests of all religions
have been, throughout all the phases of history, the most potent allies
of the ruling classes in keeping the masses pliant and submissive under
the yoke by means of the enchantment of religion, just as the tamer
keeps wild beasts submissive by the terrors of the cracks of his whip"
(page 63).

It is also well to remember that a prevalent animistic habit of thought
in viewing the events of life, whether it take the form of a belief in
luck, as in gamblers and sporting men, or the form of a belief in
supernatural interposition in mundane affairs, as in the case of the
devotees of the anthropomorphic cults, or merely the tendency to give a
teleological interpretation to evolution, to attribute a meliorative
trend to the cosmic process, as in Tennyson's "through the ages one
increasing purpose runs,"