Note (return) — CHAPTER TWO The Children of Zion and the Sons of Greece

But while the reasons for the failure are not far to seek, it is worth while for the preacher to dwell on them for a moment. In strongly centered souls like a Morley or an Erasmus, humanism produces a stoical endurance and a sublime self-confidence. But it tends, in lesser spirits, to a restless arrogance. Hence, both those lower elements in human nature, the nature and extent of whose force it either cloaks or minimizes, and those imponderable and supersensuous values which it tends to ignore and which are not ordinarily included in its definition of experience, return to vex and plague it. Indeed the worst foe of humanism has never been the religious view of the world upon whose stored-up moral reserves of uncompromising doctrine it has often half-consciously subsisted. Humanism has long profited from the admitted truth that the moral restraints of an age that possesses an authoritative and absolute belief survive for some time after the doctrine itself has been rejected. What has revealed the incompleteness of the humanistic position has been its constant tendency to decline into naturalism; a tendency markedly accelerated today. Hence, we find ourselves in a disintegrating and distracted epoch. In 1912 Rudolph Eucken wrote: "The moral solidarity of mankind is dissolved. Sects and parties are increasing; common estimates and ideals keep slipping away from us; we understand one another less and less. Even voluntary associations, that form of unity peculiar to modern times, unite more in achievement than in disposition, bring men together outwardly rather than inwardly. The danger is imminent that the end may be bellum omnium contra omnes, a war of all against all."12