TECHNOLOGY, CLASS-CONFLICT, EMPLOYMENT 625
was no adequate armament for meeting the impetuous attack of the
most formidable assailant that the Franks had yet encountered.

The Communist onslaught had thus forced upon its Western victims
a drastic choice between two extreme alternatives. Either the Westerners
must resign themselves to seeing the defeat of a Western ideal of per-
sonal liberty that had been depotentiated in the process of being secu-
larized, or else they must reinstate this now gravely imperilled ideal in
its original Christian setting, since it was only through being recon-
secrated that the ideal of Liberty could be revalidated. In forcing this
choice upon a post-Christian Western Society, a post-Christian Russian
Society was unintentionally doing an inestimably valuable service to its
unloved sister; for it was thrusting into its Western adversary's unnerved
hand the one spiritual weapon that had the power to turn the balance in
the hitherto weaker combatant's favour. In a struggle between the two
conflicting ideals of Freedom and Totalitarianism in which the cause
of Freedom was at a desperate disadvantage so long as Freedom meant
nothing more than a secular civil liberty, the idol Leviathan might still
be triumphantly defied and defeated by souls contending for the liberty
of Conscience and risking martyrdom for the glory of God.

If a latter-day Western Liberalism was to be retransfigured into the
religion that was the fountain-light of all its day and the master-light of
all its seeing,1 it would have to carry out both a negative and a positive
spiritual exercise.

Its negative task would be to recapture a saving humility. The first
lesson in humility, for a society that had won a dominion over non-
Human Nature by enthroning Natural Science in a dethroned Religion's
seat, would be to acknowledge and confess the spiritual impotence of a
Mechanized Technology that had proved itself capable of moving
physical mountains ;2 and the palinode that was now demanded of the
Western scientific intellect could not be evaded by the gesture of re-
placing a Newtonian *God the Engineer* by an Einsteinian *God the
Mathematician'.3 This perfunctory twentieth-century Western etherial-
ization of a complacent eighteenth-century Western deism would not
be enough to restore sick Western souls to spiritual health; for, though

1 Wordsworth, op. cit.

2 The writer can remember an occasion in one of the museums in London when he
was gazing, as a child, at a beautiful fragment of Medieval Western stained glass and was
'•——=- -r to his mother's comment that this was the one Medieval Western art of which

the Modern Western World had lost the secret. This remark made a lasting impression
on his mind, because, for this mind at that age, an admission of the possibility of
retrogression, even in one single art, had been as disquieting as it had been novel. In his
subsequent musings over this recollection of early childhood, the writer gradually came
to perceive that, while the loss of any technique was something portentous in a social
milieu in which Technology was in excelsis, the Modem Western World's loss of the
Medieval Western technique of making stained glass was particularly significant. It was
indeed no accident that this particular technique should have been the first to have
slipped out of a Modern Western virtuoso's hand; for, of all Medieval Western tech-
niques, the making of stained glass had been the one in which Technology had been the
most dependent for its success upon its marriage with Spirituality; and the repudiation
of a Medieval Western spirituality had been the price of the sensational advance of a
secularized Modern Western science.

3 'We have already considered with disfavour the possibility of the Universe having
been planned by a biologist or an engineer; from the intrinsic evidence of His creation,
the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician*
(Jeans, Sir James: The Mysterious Umverye (Cambridge 1930, University Press), p. 134).