THE two outstanding characteristics of our age are the revival of violence, of conflict, and the revival of religion. The revival of conflict is obvious enough — conflict between classes, between parties between races, between nations. The revival of religion is not so generally recognized. The reason for this is that for most Europeans and Americans — and it is their philosophers who are foremost in formulating and describing the clash of ideas — religion still means Christianity: and the religions of the new conflicting forces are at the antipodes to Christianity.

There is to-day no more important conflict than the conflict of ideas. It was possible for intelligent men in the nineteenth century to think that conduct could be divorced from belief. Indeed it was a common opinion: and it was as wrong as it was common. We see all over the world the disastrous consequences of the attempt to separate conduct from creed.

The most extreme conflict is that between those who believe in the world of freedom and those who believe in the world of fate. Between the disciples of reason and the instruments of the unconscious. Between the children of the: spirit and the servants of the machine.

The Editor of this series is a Christian; but he would not put forward the arrogant and ridiculous claim that no religion but ............