of the existence of magic. Carried to its logical
extreme, ethical monotheism could discredit magic only by substituting
personal for impersonal agency, and then proclaiming a monopoly of
personal agency. It is evident, then, that science, rather than
religion, has been the real foe of magic, because it grappled with it
empirically, and in a detailed fashion, in the midst of the here and
now of human events. Ethical monotheism is abstract, deductive and
dogmatic. What was necessary was a critical movement at once concrete,
inductive and empirical. Religion develops only the moral reason and
tends to leave the wider reaches of reason an uncultivated field.
Hence the traitor of superstition was never far from it, thunder as the
preacher would from the pulpit. Victory over darkness requires the
spread of light into every nook and cranny of the human soul.

The age-long conflict has passed its crisis. Yet all too few willingly
give their whole-hearted allegiance to the ideals and methods of
science. The struggle upward from primitive ignorance and superstition
to the conception of slow-working impersonal agency has been toilsome
and tiring, and the germs of sullen revolt are in more breasts than we
often suppose. Man's hold on the good is frail; let us seek to
strengthen it and to widen its grasp. Laudation of the practical {57}
applications of science is not enough. All are ready to be healed and
to be made the masters of nature. Too few are willing to accept the
implications of natural science and press on toward a philosophy
conflicting with the ideas of the universe cherished by their fathers.

{58}

CHAPTER V

THE ORIGINS OF CHRISTIANITY

Let us now pass from the study of the general features of the ancient
outlook upon nature to a study of the Christian view of the world. Is
the Christian view of the world inseparably bound up with this ancient
outlook, or can it be purged of it? Is the moral fervor and idealism
of Christianity its essential and permanent contribution, a
contribution to a rational appreciation of human life? Probing still
deeper, let us not be afraid to ask ourselves whether the surgery which
this thesis implies does not involve the daring of a break with theism
as only a developed form of primitive animism? In ethical monotheism,
may not the _monotheism_ be the protecting envelope from which the
butterfly has already flown?

The part played by Christianity in the develop