602 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION

working not solely for its own material profit, but also for the benefit of
a majority of its fellow men who were still living at the Peasantry's
starveling level. Industrialism was a Western gift to Mankind at large
which might be not the less beneficent for having been unintended; and
the best hope for Mankind lay in a spiritually fruitful marriage of the
Western engineer's insight with the Asian husbandman's. The peasant
had to learn from the engineer that, in Human Life on Earth, a mini-
mum of economic well-being was the necessary material condition
(flraeck ^op^y/a) for spiritual achievement, while the engineer had to
learn—or re-learn—from the peasant that the enterprise of increasing
Man's command over Non-Human Nature had no value except as a
means towards some end beyond itself, even if the particular end that
had been the Peasantry's traditional objective were now an anachronism
in the new world that the engineer had conjured into existence.

If these were the new religious issues that a future oecumenical Mal-
thusian crisis might be expected to raise, it was also to be foreseen that
this crisis would present a challenge to the old religious establishments,
since the Peasantry's primitive worship of family continuity was part of
the flotsam which the higher religions had picked up and swept along in
their flood waters when they had come down upon Mankind in spate.1
Even a Buddhism whose original, authentic, and essential mission had
been to reveal to suffering human beings a way of escape from the sorrow-
ful wheel of sensuous existence had not succeeded in keeping clear of an
older cult of procreation which was its antithesis; and, if Siddhartha
Gautama's philosophy had thus been constrained to come to terms with
the husbandman's religion, it was not surprising that Confucianism,
Christianity, and Hinduism should have been captivated by it.

In these divers higher religions and philosophies the influence of the
cult of procreation could be detected in different degrees. In the Roman
Catholic variety of Western Christianity this influence had not penetrated
so deep as to impose upon the ecclesiastical subjects of the Catholic
Church the positive pre-Christian commandment to be fruitful and
multiply; the influence of the primitive cult on the current Catholic
Christian code of morals could be detected only in a ban upon artificial
methods of birth-control that had been invented in the Western World in
the twentieth century of the Christian Era; and a prohibition that could
be criticized as an irrational concession to Conservatism could also be
defended on its merits as a courageous stand against a morally unde-
sirable sexual practice. But the pertinent fact for the purposes of an
inquiry into the prospects of the Western Civilization was that, in all the
higher religions alike, the cult of procreation had won a footing that was
sufficiently strong to threaten—or promise—to bring a revolutionary
public policy into collision with established religious traditions if the
time were to come when the pressure of the World's population upon the
World's food supply would compel an oecumenical public authority to
grapple with the formidable task of trying to regulate the movement of
the World's population.

In this not improbable event, what would the old religious estab-

* See VII. vii. 455.