TECHNOLOGY, CLASS-CONFLICT, EMPLOYMENT 619
Heaven1 the slip. Rather than relinquish His pursuit of His spiritual
prey,2 He had resumed it in the guise of a heJJ hound; and a liberal-
minded and rationalist-minded society which had facilely assumed that
it had rid itself of fanaticism for ever by exorcizing it on the ecclesiastical
plane had lived to see it break out again with seven-fold virulence on
political and economic planes on which the complacent watchman had
been off his guard.

Mid-way through the twentieth century of the. Christian Era it was
already evident that the choice before Western Man was, not whether he
was to be religious or irreligious, but whether his spiritual allegiance was
to be given to this religion or to that; and in a scientific-minded society
this choice between competing religions was limited virtually to two
alternatives. A twentieth-century Western World might either return to
a Christian worship of the God who is Love as well as Power, or it might
succumb to a Narcissan worship of Man's own hypnotizing image. In an
age in which Human Technology had so decisively and sensationally
subjugated Non-Human Nature, it was no longer possible for Man to
find a third alternative in a return to the worship of a Magna Mater who
had been the principal object of Man's worship before the higher re-
ligions had made their epiphany in the wake of Civilization's higher
technology. A generation that had discovered how to 'annihilate dis-
tance' and how to split the atom might be more prone than any of its
predecessors to fall into the deadly error of deifying Man, but it had
effectively debarred itself from recapturing a primitive vision of Non-
Human Nature as the Great Mother of gods and men.

A Physical Universe that a Western Science had stripped naked and
dissected could no longer be mistaken for a Theotokos. At the most she
might be personified poetically as one of God's daughters; and the error
of according to her some of the worship due exclusively to God Himself
was a pitfall into which a twentieth-century Western worshipper of the
One True God would have no excuse for falling, considering that, in a
seventh-century Mecca, the Prophet Muhammed, at a time when his
prophetic mission had been at its nadir, had manfully overcome a
momentary temptation to compromise with the traditional idolatry of
his compatriots by associating the three goddesses of the Ka'bah—
Manat, Allat, and al-'Uzza—with the worship of an Allah whose
daughters these goddesses had been deemed to be.3 The One True God
and His creature Man were the sole two possible alternative objects of
worship for a Homo Faber Mechamcas; and the choice between these two
competitors for victory, in the final round of a struggle for existence be-
tween religions that was coeval with Mankind, had been brought to a
crisis by a triumph of Human Technology over Non-Human Nature
which had conclusively discredited the primitive worship of a Magna
Mater.

Now that a conquered Material Universe was out of the nixining, Man
Himself was the greatest power of which Man had any indisputable

* Thompson, Francis: The Hound of Heaven.

2 Blake, William: The Everlasting Gospel, jS, L 37.

3 For the tradition of this incident, see Andrae, T.: Mohammed: The Man and his
Faith (New York 1936, Scribner), pp. 21-23.