Between eastern and western Christianity, finally, there seems to be no prospect of ecclesiastical fraternization, though hopes of that kind have been sometimes floated in the Anglican Church. At the church of the Holy Sepulchre the Greeks and the Latins are in chronic strife; it was one of their squabbles that brought about the Crimean War; and in the present year they have shed blood in one of their scuffles. [26] The visitor to Jerusalem thus witnesses the standing spectacle of an impassive Turkish soldier keeping the peace between mobs of Christian devotees, eager to fly at each other's throats. CHAPTER IV THE RELATION TO PROGRESS § 1. Moral Influence It is a deeply significant fact that in recent times the defence of Christianity takes much more often the form of a claim that it is socially useful than that of an attempt to prove it true. The argument from utility is indeed an old one: it is an error to say, as did J. S. Mill, that men have been little concerned to put it in competition with the argument from truth; but the former is now in special favour. Insofar as it proceeds upon a survey of Christian history it may here be left to the test of confrontation with the facts; but as it is constantly urged with regard to the actual state of life and faith, it is necessary to consider it in conclusion. The chief difficulty in such an inquiry is that the most irreconcilable formulas are put forth on the side and in the name of belief. Commonly it is claimed that all that is good in current morality is derived from Christian sources; that morally scrupulous unbelievers are so because of their religious training or environment; and that a removal of the scaffolding of creed will bring to ruin the edifice of conduct that is held to have been reared by its means. It is not usually realized that such an argument ends in crediting to paganism and Judaism the alleged moral merits of the first Christians. It might indeed be suggested, as against the traditional account of their pre-eminent goodness, that either they, in turn, owed their character to their antecedents, or their creed lost its efficacy after the first generation. But the historic answer to the claim is that there has never been any such moralizing virtue in the Christian or any other creed in historically familiar times as need alarm any one for the moral consequences of its gradual disappearance. All sudden and revolutionary changes in popular moral standards certainly appear to be harmful; but the great majority of such changes in the Christian era have been worked under the auspices of faith, having consisted not in the abandonment of belief, but in the restatement of ethics in terms of "inspiration." Unbelief proceeds with no such cataclysmic speed. It is not conceivable that the gradual dissolution of supernaturalist notions will ever of itself work such evil as is told of in the story of the military evangel