526 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
Powers each remained at liberty to use this appalling weapon in waging
war against its neighbour. Yet, if this risk of a Third World War fought
with atomic weapons was the consideration that made the establishment
of some kind of world order imperative, it would be a reductio ad
abmrdum of Mankind's quest for freedom from, fear if, in seeking the
solid and lasting security against a social catastrophe that was to be
found in the establishment of a unitary control over atomic energy, the
governments and peoples of the two surviving Great Powers were to
precipitate the very catastrophe that all Mankind was concerned to
avert. If the establishment of a world order was imperative for the sake
of avoiding an atomic war, the avoidance of an atomic war must be
imperative a fortiori, as an end in itself.

In the circumstances of the time the greatest menace to the welfare
and existence of the Human Race was not the invention of atomic
weapons, but the rise in living human souls of a temper reminiscent
of a mood once prevalent in an Early Modern Western World for about
a hundred years beginning with the outbreak of the Western Wars of
Religion in the seventh decade of the sixteenth century of the Christian
Era. At the opening of the second half of the twentieth century there
were Capitalists and Communists who, like their Catholic and Pro-
testant forerunners, felt it to be impracticable as well as intolerable to
acquiesce in leaving the allegiance of Society divided, for an indefinite
time to come, between an orthodoxy that they identified with their own
faith and a heresy that they identified with the ideology of their adver-
saries. The wrong-headedness of this attitude was betrayed by the con-
clusion, logically following from it, that Orthodoxy was called upon by
duty and self-interest in unison to combat, suppress, and eliminate
Heresy by the ruthless employment of every weapon at Orthodoxy's
command. The history of the Western Wars of Religion bore witness
that spiritual issues could not be settled by force of arms; and the
acquisition of atomic weapons gave warning that it would not be open
to Capitalists and Communists in a post-Modern Age of Western
history to learn the futility of religious warfare, and the necessity for
religious toleration, by an empirical method of prolonged trial and
chastening error that had been practicable for Catholics and Protestants
in an Early Modern Age in which gunpowder was the deadliest weapon
at the command of wrong-headed crusaders.

In the nmeteen-fifties, as in the fifteen-sixties, the advocate of a
patience that could claim to be the highest form of fortitude laid him-
self open, no doubt, to the charge of being a contemptible procrastinator
who could offer no prospect of being able ultimately to avert the 'show-
down* that he was cravenly seeking to postpone; but in the nineteen-
fifties, at any rate, this taunt did the Fabian policy an injustice; for it
failed to take account of the positive advantage that Mankind stood to
gain by a successful pursuit of a policy of playing for time in the
particular social circumstances of the Westernizing World of the day.
The vehemence of the animosity, at this date, between the respective
adherents of Commtinism and of a traditional Western way of life was
one of the psychological effects of the sudden coalescence and shrinkage