It was the greatest new beginning in the world's
history, and the wealth of political and literary and social and
artistic traditions it abandoned had subsequently to be revived and
assimilated to it fragment by fragment from the past it had submerged.
Now, I do not see that the world to-day presents any fair parallelism to
that sere age of stresses in whose recasting Christianity played the
part of a flux. Ours is on the whole an organizing and synthetic rather
than a disintegrating phase throughout the world. Old institutions are
neither hard nor obstinate to-day, and the immense and various
constructive forces at work are saturated now with the conception of
evolution, of secular progressive development, as opposed to the
revolutionary idea. Only a very vast and terrible war explosion can, I
think, change this state of affairs.
This conveys in general terms, at least, my interpretation of the
present time, and it is in accordance with this view that the world is
moving forward as a whole and with much dispersed and discrepant
rightness, that I do not want to go apart from the world as a whole into
any smaller community, with all the implication of an exclusive
possession of right which such a going apart involves.
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