still in the field as alternatives to a 'colour-bar' which, so far from solving
the problem, grievously aggravated it. The living examples of these hap-
pier alternative responses might perhaps still have some effect on the
eventual handling of the race problem in English-speaking provinces of
a Westernizing World in which the 'colour-bar* was a stumbling-block
to Protestant as well as Catholic Christian consciences.

In the United States, in particular, at the time of writing, the tendency
of a 'colour-bar' to harden into a caste-distinction on Indie lines was
being resisted by the counter operation of the spirit of Christianity; and,
though, at the time of writing, it was still impossible to tell whether this
Christian counter-attack was a forlorn hope or whether it was 'the wave
of the Future', it was at least a good omen that in the United States, as
in India, the redeeming spirit had been at work on both sides. In the
hearts of a dominant North American White majority a Christian con-
science that had insisted on abolishing the evil institution of Negro
Slavery at the cost of a civil war within the bosom of the White com-
munity had come to realize that a merely juridical emancipation was not
enough, and had been moved by the Apostle's warning of the spiritual
unprofitableness of good works, if these were not hallowed by Christian
love,1 to press on towards the more elusive goal of winning for a juridi-
cally emancipated Negro minority a social and psychological equality
for lack of which the bare legal status of personal freedom had proved to
be as bitter to the taste as Dead Sea fruit. This indefatigably sustained
Christian endeavour on the part of a White minority that was the salt of
this North American earth would, however, have been of little avail if
a Christian spirit on a Coloured minority's side had not been ready
to respond to a contrite White minority's Christian overtures. In other
contexts2 we have admired the spectacle of a Negro anima naturaliter
Christiana taking to heart, in a New World that, for the African slave,
had been a land, not of hope and glory, but of exile and servitude, a
Christianity that had left no mark on the stony hearts of White slave-
traders and slave-owners who had been its incongruous and impervious
carriers. In North America, as in India, if the schism in the body social
were eventually to be healed, the salvaging of a disintegrating civiliza-
tion would, once again, have been Christianity's achievement.

A third arena in a Westernizing World in which Christianity had been
battling with an inhumanity that had been making for social disruption
was on the Western Society's home front, and on this front the critical
sector was a Britain that had been the scene of the first eruption of a Late
Modern Western Industrial Revolution. If, in the generation in which
this visitation was conjuring into existence the English vanguard of an
oecumenical industrial urban proletariat, John Wesley (vwebat AJ>.
1703-91) had not devoted a long life to evangelizing an English under-
world to which an eighteenth-century Established Church had heart-
lessly turned a blind eye, who can tell that the tribulations to which this
pastor's sheep were subjected during the half-century following his
death might not have goaded them into savagely militant insurrections
of the kind that had once devastated a disintegrating Hellenic World in

1 i Cor. xiii, passim. z See II. ii. 213-16 and 218-30, and V. v, 191-3.