EPILOGUE 355

helping to break down the resistance of individuals and
groups to their absorption by the fascist state, the Church
has accepted and smiled on the omnipotence of this state
which denies freedom to the independent conscience and to
religion itself. Even, or rather particularly, when official
honours are being heaped on it, religion only survives under
fascism by allowing itself to be used as a tool. Like fascism
it becomes merely a discipline, a useful means of consoling
and restraining the common people, an indispensable
resource that so many atheists, from Voltaire to Mussolini,
have invoked. c Religion for the poor ' is thus added to
c imperialism for the proletariaty in the well-filled fascist
armoury of tf raison d'etat.'1

Since fascism exalts action and denies philosophy, must
faith in philosophy be signalized by the denial of action ?
The pundits who take this line betray philosophy twice over
by betraying both philosophy and action. No conception
of life is true or workable unless It is universally applicable,
and in this case c universally ' applies to each individual
man, and so to humanity as a whole. Man and humanity
are identical terms. It is impossible to affirm what is human
in individual man without realizing it in the whole of
mankind. Hence the human must be supreme, and im-
press itself on every branch of life. There can be no giving
way to Jaits accomplis, no surrender to success ; the respon-
sibilities that are owed to all men cannot be avoided by an
escape into the realm of good intentions. Good intentions
by themselves do no good. It is not enough to be in the
right; one has got to succeed.
Methods and tactics are necessary therefore ; weapons
must be chosen.* forces combined, the decision made as to
where they are to be applied ; certain positions must be
abandoned in order to win others; progress must be made
through advances a,nd retreats and cunning manoeuvres
whose meaning only becomes apparent with their coxnple-
1 Thus on February 26, 1937, a week after the Addis Ababa massacres, the
Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, Monsignor Schuster, compared Mussolini to
the most glorious of the Roman emperors* and hailed * the Italian legions
who are occupying Abyssinia in order to ensure to its people the double
advantage of imperial civilization and the catholic faith ?*