Europe. The bulk of the people have ceased to receive any influence from
the representatives of Christianity, yet there has been moral progress
instead of deterioration. Those who speak of degeneration in London or
Paris do not accurately know and estimate the state of those cities in
more religious times.

This experience might be enlarged indefinitely, but one or two instances
will suffice for my purpose. The soundness of these instances which I
quote I have established elsewhere, and the general truth to which I
refer may be sufficiently gathered from the words of the clergy
themselves. The rhetorical way in which they characterise our times is
more or less typical of the carelessness of their judgments and the
strength of their prejudices. One group of clerical writers, which
generally includes the reigning Pope, speak in the darkest terms of our
age and suggest that a sensible degeneration has followed the decrease
of the influence of the Churches. Another group, considering the
remarkable spread of idealism in our generation, the growing demand for
peace, justice, and sobriety, claim that this moral progress, which they
cannot deny, is due to some tardy recognition of the spirit of Christ:
a strange contention, seeing that our age is less and less willing to
hear the words of Christ and ascribes its sentiments to entirely
different inspiration. Hence there are a few who frankly admit that the
idealism of modern times is to them a rebuke and a mystery. One of these
more sensitive religious writers once confessed to me that the fact that
the times became better while the influence of Christianity grew less
was to him a perplexing truth.

The really honest social student, who does not measure his age by his
prejudices, but fashions his theories according to the carefully
ascertained facts, will try to discover the causes of this phenomenon.