ilan, '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, ad the practical Atheism
in which it is engulfed? 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 was 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 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 minimize 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 got 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 ethical value, its appeal to something beyond
man. Has Christianity brought us to this: that the Christian nations are
to be the first in the world's history to try the experiment of a life
without faith--that life which you and I, at any rate, are agreed in
thinking a life worthy only of the brute?