THE FUTURE OF HUMANISM
SIR,—Dr. Gilbert Murray's kind and generous letter prompts me to ask your leave to add something for which there was not room in my article. " He that is not against us is on our part." In face of all that threatens to overwhelm us, those who are fundamentally believers in human values cannot afford to quarrel. There could be no more futile waste of power than for Humanists and Christians to indulge in the barren energy of recrimination. We need one another—now more than ever. Christianity on its side needs the Humanists. They can help to save us from that current tendency towards a theological transcendentalism which must very seriously impair its influence. The Christian religion is robbed of half its meaning if it is divorced from its real context amid those other activities of Spirit, in the arts and sciences and humane causes to which Humanism bears its witness. Humanists on their side need Christianity. If it falls, Humanism will fall with it. For—as I tried to say in my review and as events now so clearly demonstrate—Humanism is not self-sustaining. It can only stand in the evil day if it rests on those ultimate convictions which are enshrined in the creed of Christianity. The liberal and humane " Christian " Ethos breaks down without the support of Christian doctrine. If its intellectual foundations crack, no tradition can survive long.
Thus, as I say, we need one another. Perhaps we have drawn our frontiers too narrowly. The time has come when it should be frankly recognised that all who believe in Righteousness and Charity, though they may not call them- selves Christians, are nevertheless followers of the True Light and citizens of that Christian inheritance which is now so dangerously imperilled. Might not they, in turn, be pre- pared to recognise that they cannot survive without the
Church to sustain that belief in human values which depends, in the long run, on faith in God?
" Scepticism " such as Dr. Murray's is not an alternative to Christianity : it is a " naturally Christian " creed which stops short of the Christian affirmations. Any intellectually sincere religion must surely admit wide margins of agnosticism. A cocksure theology is seldom true. If he prefers to disclaim the name of Christian, it is not the Church that wishes to excommunicate him! Might he maintain that
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