The replacement of Christian with secular institutions is the culminating
and critical result of the Industrial Revolution. That states should attempt to
dispense with theological supports is one of the many crucial experiments
that bewilder our brains and unsettle our ways today. Laws which were
once presented as the decrees of a god-given king are now frankly the
confused commands of fallible men. Education, which was the sacred
province of god-inspired priests, becomes the task of men and women
shorn of theological robes and awe, and relying on reason and persuasion to
civilize young rebels who fear only the policeman and may never learn to
reason at all. Colleges once allied to churches have been captured by
businessmen and scientists. The propaganda of patriotism, capitalism, or
Communism succeeds to the inculcation of a supernatural creed and moral
code. Holydays give way to holidays. Theaters are full even on Sundays,
and even on Sundays churches are half empty. In Anglo-Saxon families
religion has become a social observance and protective coloration; in
American. Catholic families it flourishes; in upper- and middle-class
France and Italy religion is “a secondary sexual characteristic of the
female.” A thousand signs proclaim that Christianity is undergoing the
same decline that fell upon the old Greek religion after the coming of the
Sophists and the Greek Enlightenment.
Catholicism survives because it appeals to imagination, hope, and the
senses; because its mythology consoles and brightens the lives of the poor;
and because the commanded fertility of the faithful slowly regains the lands
lost to the Reformation. Catholicism has sacrificed the adherence of the
intellectual community, and suffers increasing defections through contact
with secular education and literature; but it wins converts from souls
wearied with the uncertainty of reason, and from others hopeful that the
Church will stem internal disorder and the Communist wave.
If another great war should devastate Western civilization, the resultant
destruction of cities, the dissemination of poverty, and the disgrace of
