TECHNOLOGY, CLASS-CONFLICT, EMPLOYMENT 635

of the Abbey of Ampleforth and was hearing a voice saying to him
Amplexus expecta ('Cling and wait').

An impetuous spiritual traveller on the road back to Religion from
Agnosticism might be inclined to interpret this dream as an irresolute
soul's subconscious apologia; and the postponement of a decision that
was ripe for being taken would indeed convict the procrastinator of a
culpable weakness of will; but the judgement on Fabius must be founded
on a right reading of his situation and his motive; and in the spiritual
circumstances of a twentieth-century Western Society an ex-agnostic
who took expectant expectavi1 for his watchword, without allowing him-
self to cry 'Make haste, O Lord, to help rue*,2 would be clear of the im-
putation of irresoluteness if his motive for resisting the temptation to
pray for a shortening of the term of his trial was a resolve to face and act
upon the truth that in a latter-day Western spiritual Odyssey the dire
passage of Time was a necessary means of grace in virtue of its being an
inevitable source of suffering.

This spiritual necessity for a painful period of probation could have
been short-circuited with impunity only if it had been possible for a
twentieth-century Western ci-devant Christian agnostic to take a tradi-
tional form of Christianity as he found it; but this would have meant
taking it back as he had left it; and that would have been no solution for
either the agnostic's or the Church's contemporary problem; for the pro-
gressive decay of a belief in, and an allegiance to, an ancestral religion,
which had been the note of a Western Society's spiritual history since
the latter decades of the seventeenth century of the Christian Era, had
not been due solely to Modern Western Man's perversity nor even solely
to his bewitchment by his intellect's entrancing scientific discoveries
and by this fascinating science's lucrative technological fruits. The re-
sponsibility for Modern Western Man's apostasy was shared with the
apostate by a Western Christian Church that had eventually alienated
its long-suffering votaries by its grievous sins of both heart and head.3

The moral scandal through which the Western Church had forfeited
Western Man's esteem had been a schism that it had allowed to rankle
into the savage Western Wars of Religion (saeviebant A.D. 1562-1660);
and the morally shattering effect of this resort to military force in pur-
suance of an ecclesiastical feud has been noticed in this Study in earlier
contexts.4 The intellectual scandal which had consummated a Western
Church Militant's self-stultification in Western eyes had been its re-
action to a Modern Western movement of intellectual enlightenment
(Aufklarung) for which the Wars of Religion had opened the door and
the subsequent Scientific Revolution had paved the way. The Western
Christian, churches' response to an intellectual challenge which their
moral iniquity had brought upon them had been to discredit themselves
intellectually as well. They had taken the stand that their traditional
creed, including the whole cumulus of accretions acquired from pre-
Christian pagan religions and from Hellenic science and philosophy, was

i Ps. T*"T- i, in the Vulgate Latin text; Ps. ad. i, in the English A,V.

a Ps. xl. 16. 3 See IV. iy. 583-4-

* See IV. iv. 142-3, 150, 184, 3*7-8, and 643-5; V. v- 669-71; and V. vi. 317,