Nature gave us a very long credit;
and we abused it to the utmost. But when she struck at last she
struck with a vengeance. For four years she smote our firstborn
and heaped on us plagues of which Egypt never dreamed. They were
all as preventable as the great Plague of London, and came solely
because they had not been prevented. They were not undone by
winning the war. The earth is still bursting with the dead bodies
of the victors.
The Wicked Half Century
It is difficult to say whether indifference and neglect are worse
than false doctrine; but Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall
unfortunately suffered from both. For half a century before the
war civilization had been going to the devil very precipitately
under the influence of a pseudo-science as disastrous as the
blackest Calvinism. Calvinism taught that as we are
predestinately saved or damned, nothing that we can do can alter
our destiny. Still, as Calvinism gave the individual no clue as
to whether he had drawn a lucky number or an unlucky one, it left
him a fairly strong interest in encouraging his hopes of
salvation and allaying his fear of damnation by behaving as one
of the elect might be expected to behave rather than as one of
the reprobate. But in the middle of the nineteenth century
naturalists and physicists assured the world, in the name of
Science, that salvation and damnation are all nonsense, and that
predestination is the central truth of religion, inasmuch as
human beings are produced by their environment, their sins and
good deeds being only a series of chemical and mechanical
reactions over which they have no control.
Pages:
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29