Chapter VIII: Conclusion

The task before Western civilization to-day, it is probable, is the greatest civilization has ever faced. It is a complete reconstruction that is demanded. It must be accomplished with speed. All the Western nations are involved. There have been other reconstructions as drastic, but either they have been permitted a much longer period of development, or they have been confined to much smaller areas.

The struggle will not be over religious opinions, or political theories, though both are involved. It will be over what touch men ordinarily much more deeply, their livelihood and their profits, and the war has seemed to show that men will sacrifice their lives more readily than their profits. It will be a struggle no class can escape.

The readjustments would be difficult enough in themselves if men engaged in them in the calmest and kindliest spirit. But many who will be foremost in the task of reconstruction bring to the problems the bitterness and distrust engendered by centuries of cruel wrong.

Nothing but Christianity can carry the Western peoples through this unparallelled crisis. But it must be Christianity in its purity and its fulness, not a Christianity wasting its energy on doctrinal controversy, broken by denominational divisions, or absorbed in taking care of its machinery. It must, in short, be a Christianity neither intellectualized nor sectarianized nor institutionalized.

It must be a Christianity, born as at the first in the hearts of the common people, simple, democratic, brotherly; like a tree, its top in the sky but its roots deep in common earth; treating institutions, even the most venerable, as the mere temporary contrivances that they are; with the faith of Jesus in the human heart and in the ultimate triumph of love, and a willingness, like His, to find a throne in a cross.

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