The name is absent

Religion               65

its successful outcome that they are willing to make the
utmost sacrifice in order to bring it in triumphantly. Sim-
ilarly in regard to the ideal of Fascism. Its adherents have
confessedly found in what has been offered them something
to which they may devote their energies so completely that
the individual loses his own aims in the mass, and throws
himself into it both for protection against an evil social
order, and for fellowship in mass emotion and purposes.
The freedom of the individual thinker or idealist has be-
come of no account ; it is almost sublimated into the author-
ity of the order.

But it is a misuse of terms to call this devotion to a plan
a religion. The early Christians, it is true, had such utter
devotion to their Cause that they soon became a conquering
force in the world; but that Cause was professedly the
establishment of the Kingdom of God which was to come
in with power as their world-age passed away. The very
essence of it was that it was a new supernatural order, and
that what mattered was the realization of eternal values,
which were indeed manifested to some degree within the
social life of their communities, but only as an earnest of
what was to appear when the new Day would dawn and the
glory of the full Reign would break upon them.

The new Russian experiment has so stirred the imagina-
tion and hopes of the youth that one is lost in amazement
at the way in which millions of uneducated people have
been bent to the will of their leaders to carry out even
partially their five-year Plan. But the effort seems to con-
centrate itself so completely upon the securing of better in-
dustrial conditions as to let them fill the whole human
outlook. Religion, however, bids men lift their eyes some-
times from the earth, and even while their gaze is upon
their work and their hands are busy, to keep in their hearts

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