the indictment should now be urged with a vehemence which we do not find in the records of former convulsions.  It was not generally felt to be a scandal to Christianity that England was at war for 69 years out of the 120 which preceded the battle of Waterloo.  Either our generation expected more from Christianity, or it was far more shocked by the sudden outbreak of this fierce war than our ancestors were by the almost chronic condition of desultory campaigning to which they were accustomed.  The latter is probably the true reason.  The belief in progress, which at the beginning of the industrial revolution was an article of faith, had become a tacitly accepted presupposition of all serious thought; and even those who were dubious about the moral improvement of mankind in other directions, seldom denied that we were more humane and peaceable than our forefathers.  The disillusion has struck our self-complacency in its most vital spot.  Nothing in our own experience had prepared us for the hideous savagery and vandalism of German warfare, the first accounts of which we received with blank amazement and incredulity.  Then, when disbelief was no longer possible, there awoke within us a sense of fear for our homes and women and children—­feeling to which modern civilised man had long been a stranger.  We had not supposed that the non-combatant population of any European country would ever again be exposed to the horrors of savage warfare.  This, much more than the war itself, has made thousands feel that the house of civilisation is built upon the sand, and that Christianity has failed to subdue the most barbarous instincts of human nature.  Christians cannot regret that the flagrant contradiction between the principles of their creed and the scenes that have been enacted during the last three years is fully recognised.  But the often repeated statement that ‘Christianity has failed’ needs more examination than it usually receives from those who utter it.

History acquaints us with two kinds of religion, which, though they are not entirely separate from each other, differ very widely in their effects upon conduct and morality.  The religio which Lucretius hated, and from which he strangely hoped that the atomistic materialism of Epicurus had finally delivered mankind, has its roots in the sombre and confused superstitions of the savage.  Fear, as Statius and Petronius tell us, created the gods of this religion.  These deities are mysterious and capricious powers, who exact vengeance for the transgression of arbitrary laws which they have not revealed, and who must be propitiated by public sacrifice, lest some collective punishment fall on the tribe, blighting its crops and smiting its herds with murrain, or giving it over into the hand of its enemies.  This religion makes very little attempt to correct the current standard of values.  Its rewards are wealth and prosperity; its punishments are calamity in this world and perhaps torture in the next.  It is not, however, incapable