was to be swept back once more into chaos. It was not
that the mob of the East cared very greatly; it was their rulers who had
begun to stretch themselves after an almost eternal lethargy, and it was
hard to imagine how they could be checked at this point. There was a
touch of grimness too in the rumour that religious fanaticism was behind
the movement, and that the patient East proposed at last to proselytise
by the modern equivalents of fire and sword those who had laid aside for
the most part all religious beliefs except that in Humanity. To Oliver
it was simply maddening. As he looked from his window and saw that vast
limit of London laid peaceably before him, as his imagination ran out
over Europe and saw everywhere that steady triumph of common sense and
fact over the wild fairy-stories of Christianity, it seemed intolerable
that there should be even a possibility that all this should be swept
back again into the barbarous turmoil of sects and dogmas; for no less
than this would be the result if the East laid hands on Europe. Even
Catholicism would revive, he told himself, that strange faith that had
blazed so often as persecution had been dashed to quench it; and, of all
forms of faith, to Oliver's mind Catholicism was the most grotesque and
enslaving. And the prospect of all this honestly troubled him, far more
than the thought of the physical catastrophe and bloodshed that would
fall on Europe with the advent of the East. There was but one hope on
the religious side, as he had told Mabel a dozen times, and that was
that the Quietistic Pantheism which for the last century had made such
giant strides in East and West alike, among Mohammedans, Buddhists,
Hindus, Confucianists and the rest, should avail to check the
supernatural frenzy that inspired their exoteric brethren. Pantheism, he
understood, was what he held himself; for him "God" was the developing
sum of created life, and impersonal Unity was the essence of His being;
competition then was the great heresy that set men one against another
and delayed all progress; for, to his mind, progress lay in the merging
of the individual in the family, of the family in the commonwealth, of
the commonwealth in the continent, and of the continent in the world.
Finally, the world itself at any moment was no more than the mood of
impersonal life. It was, in fact, the Catholic idea with the
supernatural left out, a union of earthly fortunes, an abandonment of
individualism