usness through which the West is passing has,
we may rest assured, a meaning and a purpose. At the meetings of the
Catholic Truth Society it is customary for the speakers to deplore
the steady relapse of Christendom into paganism, which is going on
before their eyes. As the Church had things her own way for ten
centuries or more, these complaints on the part of her champions are
equivalent to a confession on her part of disastrous failure. Why is
the Church, after having evangelised the West and ruled it for a
thousand years, allowing it to slide back into paganism? The answer
to this question is that she herself is unwittingly paganising it.
I mean by this that, without intending to do so, she is compelling
it to choose between secularised life and arrested growth. Were a
growing tree encircled with an iron band, the day would surely come
when the tree, by the force of its own natural expansion, would
either shatter the band or allow it to cut deep into its own stem.
The growing consciousness of Humanity has long been encircled by a
rigid and inadequate conception of God. The gradual secularisation of
the West means that the soul of man is straining that particular
conception of God to breaking-point: and it is infinitely better that
it should be broken to pieces than that its iron should be allowed to
sink deep into the soul.

The secularisation of contemporary life means this, and more than
this. It means the gradual handing back of Man's life to the control
of Nature,--of Nature which is as yet unequal to the task that is
being set it, owing to its having been through all these centuries
identified with its lower self, taught to distrust itself, and
otherwise misinterpreted and mismanaged, but which, in obedience to
the primary instinct of self-preservation, will gradually rise to
the level of the responsibility that is being laid upon it. With the
further secularisation of Man's life, the need for religion to make
effective the control of Nature, by pointing out to it its own ideal
and so co-ordinating and organising all its forces, will gradually
make itself felt, and the regeneration of religion will at last have
begun.

* * * * *

For many centuries the current of religious belief in the West was
almost entirely confined to the one channel of Catholic Christianity.
There the mighty river pursued his course, "brimming and bright and
large," till the time came when, with the grad