Yes! Dogmatic Christianity was dying before this war began. When it is over, or as soon as men’s reason comes back to them, it will be dead. In France, England, Germany, in Belgium, and the other small countries, dead; and only kept wonderingly alive in Russia and some parts of Austria through peasant simplicity. “Tell me, brother, what have the Japanese done to us that we should kill them?” So said the Russian peasant in the Japanese war. So they may say in this war. And at the end go back and resume praise of the tribal God who fought for Holy Russia against the tribal God who fought for valiant Austria and the mailed fists of Germany.

This superstitional Christianity will not die in the open and be buried with pomp and ceremony; it will merely be dead—a very different thing; like the nerve in a tooth, that, to the outward eye, is just as it was. That which will take its place has already been a long time preparing to come forward. It will be too much in earnest to care for forms and ceremonies. And one thing is certain—it will be far more Christian than the so-called Christianity which has brought us to these present ends. Its creed will be a noiseless and passionate conviction that man can be saved, not by a far-away, despotic God who can be enlisted by each combatant for the destruction of his foes, but by the Divine element in man, the God within the human soul. That, in proportion as man is high, so will the life of man be high, safe from shames like this, and devoid of his old misery. The creed will be a fervent, almost secret application of the saying: “Love thy neighbour as thyself!” It will be ashamed of appeal to God to put right that which man has bungled; of supplications to the deity to fight against the deity. It will have the pride of the artist and the artizan. And it will have its own mysticism, its own wonder, and reverence for the mystery of the all-embracing Principle which has produced such a creature as this man, with such marvellous potentiality for the making of fine things, and the living of fine lives; such heroism, such savagery; such wisdom and such black stupidity; such a queer insuperable instinct for going on and on and ever on!