624 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
A belief in the absolute and inestimable value of personal liberty,
which was neither intellectually nor morally defensible when Liberty
was claimed as the divine right of an impiously deified Homunculus,
would take on a very different colour if this miserable pretender to the
divinity of his Creator were to be salvaged from the worship of himself
by again receiving 'the spirit of adoption whereby we cry "Abba,
Father!"' j1 for 'the glorious liberty of the children of God', into which
'the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corrup
tion',2 was a cause in which Christians, vindicating it against the tyrannj
of an idolatrous worship of Leviathan, could lay down their lives, if need
be, with a sure conviction that this was a worthy cause for martyrdom,
If we have accounted correctly for the abiding sincerity and earnest-
ness of a twentieth-century Western belief in personal liberty by tracing
this belief back to its historic Christian origin, we have perhaps per-
formed for a hard-pressed Liberalism a service that might have saved
the lives of the unfortunate Genoese soldiers on the field of Cr^y if they
could have done the same thing for themselves on the morning of the
26th August, 1346. We have rearmed our Liberal crossbowman by
restoring the tone of his perished Christian bow-string; and, in thus
effectively reconditioning his paralysed weapon, we have given him the
power to turn the tables on his Communist assailant; for a crossbow in
working order is more than a match for antique swords and lances. The
historian's intervention with his time-machine3 will, in fact, have given
the battle a new turn. The mail-clad horsemen will make their charge
with the same recklessly confident Han as ever, but this time their shrift
will be short, for they will never arrive within range of the expectant
longbowmen's shafts; they will meet their deaths en route at the hands of
the interloping crossbowmen whom they had imagined to be at their
mercy and had been expecting to trample under foot. They will be slain
by bolts shot at point-blank range from unexpectedly restrung arbalests.
This military simile was an enlightening allegory of the religious issue
that a post-Christian Liberalism was being forced to face under the
mounting pressure of a post-Christian Communism's challenge. On the
neo-pagan terms on which this spiritual battle had been joined, Liberal-
ism was hopelessly outmatched; for Communism had been able to put
the 6lan of its heritage of Christian enthusiasm into its worship of the
idol Leviathan, while Liberalism had condemned itself to unstring its
bow by taking as its counter-idol an Homunculus whose pretension to
divinity was so patently spurious as to be incapable of kindling any
glimmer of Christian zeal. This contemptible little idol might have been
adequate for meeting a Western Society's ideological requirements
during a comfortable nineteenth-century vacation, when Islam's once
loud challenge to the Western World had fallen silent before any
Western ear had yet begun to catch the first sound of a Communist
Russian heavy cavalry's oncoming horse-hoofs; but by the middle of
the twentieth century, when this new horde of charging Oriental cata-
phracts was bearing down, full tilt, upon a shaken Occidental infantry,
it had become manifest that a nineteenth-century belief in civil liberty
i,i5. * Rom, yiii. zi. 3 See V. vi. ax4-*5-