The
principles of the Sermon on the Mount are admirable, but their effect
upon average human nature was very different from what was intended.
Those who followed Christ did not learn to love their enemies or to
turn the other cheek. They learned instead to use the Inquisition and
the stake, to subject the human intellect to the yoke of an ignorant
and intolerant priesthood, to degrade art and extinguish science for a
thousand years. These were the inevitable results, not of the
teaching, but of fanatical belief in the teaching. The hopes which
inspire Communism are, in the main, as admirable as those instilled by
the Sermon on the Mount, but they are held as fanatically, and are
likely to do as much harm. Cruelty lurks in our instincts, and
fanaticism is a camouflage for cruelty. Fanatics are seldom genuinely
humane, and those who sincerely dread cruelty will be slow to adopt a
fanatical creed. I do not know whether Bolshevism can be prevented
from acquiring universal power. But even if it cannot, I am persuaded
that those who stand out against it, not from love of ancient
injustice, but in the name of the free spirit of Man, will be the
bearers of the seeds of progress, from which, when the world's
gestation is accomplished, new life will be born.
The war has left throughout Europe a mood of disillusionment and
despair which calls aloud for a new religion, as the only force
capable of giving men the energy to live vigorously.
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