ystems of direction and unsettled and distressed.
So, at any rate, it was Christianity appeared, in a strained and
disturbed community, in the clash of Roman and Oriental thought, and for
a long time it was confined to the drifting population of seaports
and great cities and to wealthy virgins and widows, reaching the most
settled and most adjusted class, the pagani, last of all and in its
most adaptable forms. 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. Put to the test
by my own Samurai for example by a particularly urgent and enthusiastic
discipline, I found I did not in the least want to be one of that
organization, that it only expressed one side of a much more complex
self than its disciplines permitted. And still less do I want to
hamper the play of my thoughts and motives by going apart into the
particularism of a new religion. Such refuges are well enough when the
times threaten to overwhelm one. The point about the present age, so
far as I am able to judge the world, is that it does not threaten to
overwhelm; that at the worst, by my standards, it maintains its way of
thinking instead of assimilating mine.

3.13. THE IDEA OF THE CHURCH.

Now all this leads very directly to a discussion of the relations of a
person of my way of th