TECHNOLOGY, CLASS-CONFLICT, EMPLOYMENT 637
to them would be that the task of winnowing the chaff out of the tradi-
tional form of Christianity—or any other living higher religion—was a
task to which both the two human parties to the case would find then-
own unaided judgement and insight unequal. An agnostic who could
show a valid scientific warrant for challenging the Church's apostolic
authority would be plunging out of his own depth if he then went on to
claim for himself an alternative scientific authority to replace a tradi-
tional ecclesiastical chart by a revolutionary lay blue-print; for a petri-
fied higher religion could not be requickened by methods that might
serve for reconditioning an obsolete industrial plant. A futuristic recon-
struction of Christianity by reconverted agnostics and an archaistic
restoration of it by trustees of a traditional orthodoxy would both be
impracticable for the same reason; and the reason was that no human
hands could anticipate the operation of the Holy Spirit.1
If it were then to be asked how the dayspring from on high had ever
come to visit human souls through God's tender mercy,3 the answer
would be that 'whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and scourgeth
every son whom he receiveth', and that, 'if ye endure chastening, God
dealeth with you as sons.'3 If Christianity was to be requickened in
agnostic Western souls through a winnowing of the chaff out of the
wheat,4 this palingenesia could be achieved only through suffering; and
suffering is an experience that takes Time—and takes it at a length which
is proportionate to the measure of the chastening that is required for the
sufferer's salvation. If this is the truth, then what was required, above
all things, of homeward-faring agnostic Western souls in the twentieth
century of the Christian Era was the creative endurance exemplified in
the age-long ministries of the bodhisattvas. Resisting the temptation to
hide themselves in the rock, and facing the blast of the rushing mighty
wind5 that bloweth where it listeth,6 these pilgrims through the Valley
of the Shadow of Death7 must let suffering do its unhurrying work within
them till, in the fullness of times and seasons which it was not for them
to know,8 they should receive power^ through the anguish of being born
of the spirit.10
(d) the 'law' of psychological compensation
A reader who has had the patience to follow the foregoing argument
from its opening in a prospect of technological unemployment to its
close in a vigil in expectation of a Day of Pentecost may be inclined to
ask the sceptic's question 'How can these things be?*11
In a world whose economic and political life had been caught in the
grip of regimentation, how could there be any hope of a spiritual revival
on the religious plane ? Does not this speculation conflict with previous
findings in this Study ? Have not the chapters dealing with encounters
between contemporaries led to the conclusion that every culture is an
organic whole in which all the parts prove, on trial, to be interdependent,
however independent of one another some of them may seem to be at
1 Acts ii. 1-4.	z Luke i. 78.	» Heb. xii. 6-7.
 *	Matt. iii. la.	> Acts ii. a.	* John Hi. 8.	7 Ps. annii. 4.
 *	Acts i. 7.	« Acts L 8.	*° John iii. 8,	« John iii. 9.