TECHNOLOGY, CLASS-CONFLICT, EMPLOYMENT 621
have seen that this economic issue masked a religious one that was of
much greater account and was therefore much more difficult to settle,
and we have identified this religious issue as a conflict between two in-
compatible versions of the cult of a human idol. Communism was
preaching that Man's divinity lay in Man's collective material power,
while Liberalism was preaching that it lay in men's individual and per-
sonal freedom; and we have already committed ourselves to the fore-
cast that, in a struggle for the spiritual allegiance of Mankind in which
the only two competitors in the lists were the Communists* idol Levia-
than and the Liberals' idol Homunculus, Leviathan could not fail to win
the day.

The Liberals had, in fact, virtually admitted defeat when they had
stooped to alloying their Liberalism with Nationalism; for this partial
apostasy was not merely a confession that their proper godling Homun-
culus was an unsatisfying object of worship; it was also a confession that
the Communists' idol Leviathan was verily the one true god, since, on
the road from Liberalism to Communism, Nationalism was a half-way
house at which there could be no permanent abiding place for the
harassed ci-devant Liberal traveller. In becoming a nationalist the
Liberal had in fact inadvertently but irrevocably become a fellow-
traveller with his Communist adversary, since Nationalism, in unison
with Communism and in contrast to Liberalism, was a worship of Col-
lective Man, and the only substantial difference between these two
varieties of the cult of Leviathan was that Communism was a worship of
the collective human beast in its oecumenical entirety, whereas National-
ism was a worship of it in fragments chipped off to constitute parochial
states. When even in the mundane sphere of economic and political and
military affairs these idolized parochial states had already become un-
tenable anachronisms, it was hard to believe that they could long con-
tinue to command the ideological allegiance of ex-Christians who, if
their hearts were set on worshipping Collective Man, could find ready to
hand, in Communism, an alternative form of Leviathan-worship that
was more satisfying, more rational, and more practical.

The encounter between a Communist and a Liberal ideology on a
twentieth-century Western religious battlefield was not unlike the en-
counter between the French gendarmes and the Genoese crossbowmen
in the first phase of the Battle of Crecy. The two contingents of a
twentieth-century man-worshipping army were in the field against the
same God-worshipping adversaries; but, before either or both of them
could join battle with their common theist enemy, they had first to settle
accounts with one another; and, in this preliminary heat, the Communist
devotees of Leviathan, in their attitude towards the Liberal patrons of
Homunculus, were showing all the impatience and contempt that the
French Knights had displayed in dealing with the French Crown's
Genoese mercenaries on the 26th August, 1346. In twentieth-century
Comrminist eyes the Liberal Western advocates of Individual Liberty
were as ineffective in combat as the Genoese crossbowmen had been
found by their French employers to be when their bowstrings had gone
slack as a result of an improvident exposure to the rain. These useless