motives, which adds an element of even greater tragedy to a situation
already sufficiently depressing.

If I am right in holding this to be the effective cause of the situation
we have now to meet, it is true that it is by no means the only one. The
emancipation and deliverance of the downtrodden masses of men who owed
their evil estate to the destruction of the Christian society of the
Middle Ages, was a clamourous necessity; it was a slavery as bad in some
ways as any that had existed in antiquity, and the number of its victims
was greater. The ill results of the accomplished fact was largely due to
the condition of religion which existed during the period of
emancipation. No society can endure without vital religion, and any
revolution effected at a time when religion is moribund or dissipated in
contentious fragments, is destined to be evacuated of its ideals and its
potential, and to end in disaster. Now the freeing of the slaves of the
Renaissance and the post-Reformation, and their absorption in the body
politic, was one of the greatest revolutions in history, and it came at
a time when religion, which had been one and vital throughout Western
Europe for six centuries, had been shattered and nullified, and its
place taken, in the lands that saw the great liberation, by Calvinism,
Lutheranism, Puritanism and atheism, none of which could exert a guiding
and redemptive influence on the dazed hordes that had at last come up
into the light of day.

In point of fact, therefore, we are bound to trace back the
responsibility for the present crisis even to the Reformation itself, as
well as to the tyranny and absolutism of government, and the sordid and
profligate ordering of society, which followed on the end of
Mediaevalism.