uite in the line of the truth. You have to go to Asia to find out
what religion means. If you cannot get so far, Russia will serve as a
half-way house; but to study religion on its native heath, so to
speak, you must go to India. Of course there may be some illusion in
the matter, due to one's ignorance of the languages and inability to
estimate the exact spiritual significance of outward manifestations;
but I cannot believe that, anywhere between Suez and Singapore, there
exists that healthy godlessness, that lack of any real effective
dependence on any outward Power "dal tetto in su," which is so common
in and around all Christian churches. In China and Japan it is another
matter. There, I fancy, religious "ronins" are common enough. But in
the lands of the Crescent and the land of "OM," anything like freedom
of the human spirit is probably very rare and very difficult. The
difference does not arise from any lesser stringency in the claims of
Christianity to spiritual dominion, but rather, I imagine, from a
deep-seated divergence in racial heredity. We Western Aryans have
behind us the serene and splendid rationalisms of Greece and Rome. We
are accustomed from childhood to the knowledge that our civilization
was founded by two mighty aristocracies of intellect, to whom the
religions of their day were, as they are to us, nothing but more or
less graceful fairy-tales.[4] We know that many of the greatest men
the world ever saw, while phrasing their relation to the "deus
absconditus" in various ways, were utterly free from that penitential,
supplicatory abjectness which is the mark of Asian salvationism. And
though of course the conscious filiation to Greece and Rome is rare,
the habit of mind which holds up its head in the world and feels no
childish craving to cling to the skirts of a God, is not rare at all.
Therefore I conceive that people who are shaken out of their
conventional, unrealized Christianity by the earthquake of the war
will not, as a rule, be in any hurry to rush into the arms of the
"great brother" constructed for them by Mr. Wells. It is easier to
picture them flocking to the banner of the Fabian Jesus--the Christ
uncrucified, and restored to sanity, of Mr. Bernard Shaw.

[4] Namque deos didici securum agere aevum,
nec, siquid miri faciat natura, deos id
tristes ex alto caeli demittere tecto.
HORACE, _Satires_ I., 5.

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