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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
I have chosen my topic for this evening with an eye to something rather more than its intrinsic philosophical interest. Modern man, as we are all painfully aware, is facing a crisis of peculiar gravity. Perhaps the odds are not so very heavy against a third world war followed by world collapse into anarchy and barbarism. At such a time the philosopher is bound to ask himself whether there is no contribution which his science can make towards the succour of civilization.
page 123 note 1 I should perhaps emphasize that I am not directly concerned in this address with what is sometimes called the “spiritual crisis” of our age. This refers in the main, I take it, to the vacuum left in so many minds by the loss of traditional beliefs, and to the clamant need for some new Weltanschauung which has power to appeal to the heart and intellect of modern man. This problem—though it has its own urgency—it is meaningful to discuss in terms of solutions which may not have much effect for decades. But unfortunately one cannot confidently assume that humanity has even one decade in which to solve the crisis I am dealing with in this address.
page 124 note 1 The danger to which I allude has been exposed in language stronger than I should have dared to use in a recent broadcast by a distinguished historian who certainly cannot be accused of a bias against Christianity: “The churches seem to me to have refrained from persecution—or reconciled themselves to the abandonment of it—very much in proportion as churchmen lost the government of society, or lacked the power to behave as they wished. Indeed to me one of the terrible things of history—an issue which I cannot be satisfied to evade—is the fact that the Christian church began a cruel policy of persecution from the earliest moment when it was in a position (and had the power) to do so; while at the other end of the story both Catholic and Protestant churches fought to the last point of cruelty not merely to maintain their persecuting power—but fought a separate war for each separate weapon of persecution that was being taken from them. All this is not in any sense an argument against Christianity itself, but it is a serious comment on human nature even as it appears in ecclesiastical history.” (“Christianity and the Historian.” ProfessorButterfield, Herbert in The Listener, Vol. XLI, pp. 582–3Google Scholar.)