traditional religion of our own civilisation ; Christianity, a religion that is neither wholly metaphysical nor merely ethical, but one that brings the spiritual world into vital and fruitful communion with the life of man.
The whole spiritual inheritance of European civilisation is based upon Christianity, and even to-day whatever there is of religious life and spiritual aspiration in the West still draws its vitality from Christian sources.
Nevertheless it must be admitted that for centuries Christianity has been progressively losing its hold on Western culture, and both its doctrines and its moral ideals have fallen into discredit.’ The causes of this state of things lie deep in that process of the humanisation and rationalising of Western culture which I described in the earlier part of this essay. Ever since the Renaissance the centrifugal tendencies in our civilisation have destroyed its spiritual unity and divided its spiritual forces. The Western mind has turned away from the contemplation of the absolute and the eternal to the knowledge of the particular and the contingent.
It has made man the measure of all things and has sought to emancipate human life from its dependence on the supernatural. Instead of the whole intellectual and social order being subordinated to spiritual principles, every activity 66