Page:The ways of war - Kettle - 1917.pdf/78

 rived or was in sight. Coventry Patmore is entirely right when he says that belief in the perfectibility of man on earth is the last proof of weakmindedness. If we fall to rise, it is also true that we rise to fall. It is, perhaps, the chief gain of the agony of war that men have come once more to recognise that in their proudest exaltations sin stands chuckling at their elbows; that moral evil is a reality, and that the opposite notion was a spider-web spun by German metaphysics out of its own entrails. But with these limitations the world before the war promised well for all reasonable human hopes. The old materialism was all but dead. It is true that a few antiquated German heresiarchs like Professor Haeckel still expounded a thing called Monism in sixpenny editions. It is true that a tribe of German professors were still engaged (with much aid and abetment from English savants and publishers in an attempt to shred into myth those plain historical documents, the Gospels. But on the whole the reigning philosophy was that of Bergson, a philosophy of life, Latin and lucid, which was a distinct return to St. Thomas Aquinas, to Aristotle, and to the common daylight. And in the region of Higher Criticism people were asking themselves very earnestly whether savants like Harnack and the rest, having regard to their general flat-footedness of apprehension, were likely to be good judges of any evidence of anything whatever, human or divine.