My purpose is to examine the mind of modern Christianity, the only
religion of the world with which the world can never be done, because it
has the lasting quality of growth, and to see whether in the condition
of that mind one cannot light upon a cause for the confessed failure of
the Church to impress humanity with what its documents call the Will of
God--a failure the more perplexing because of the wonderful devotion,
sincerity, and almost boundless activity of the modern Church.

As a clue to the object of this quest, I would ask the reader to bear in
mind that the present disordered state of the world is by no means a
consequence of the late War.

The state of the world is one of confusion, but that confusion is
immemorial. Man has for ever been wrestling with an anarchy which has
for ever defeated him. The history of the human race is the diary of a
Bear Garden. Man, so potent against the mightiest and most august
forces of nature, has never been able to subdue those trivial and
unworthy forces within his own breast--envy, hatred, malice, and all
uncharitableness--which make for world anarchy. He has never been able
to love God because he has never been able to love his neighbour. It is
in the foremost nations of the world, not in the most backward, in the
most Christian nations, not the most pagan, that we find unintelligent
conditions of industrialism which lead to social disorder, and a vulgar
disposition to self-assertion which makes for war. History and Homicide,
it has been said, are indistinguishable terms. "Man is born free, and
everywhere he is in chains."

This striking impotence of the human race to arrive at anything in the
nature of a coherent world-order, this bewildering incapacity of