The age-long conflict has passed its crisis. Yet all too few willingly give their whole-hearted allegiance to the ideals and methods of science. The struggle upward from primitive ignorance and superstition to the conception of slow-working impersonal agency has been toilsome and tiring, and the germs of sullen revolt are in more breasts than we often suppose. Man's hold on the good is frail; let us seek to strengthen it and to widen its grasp. Laudation of the practical {57} applications of science is not enough. All are ready to be healed and to be made the masters of nature. Too few are willing to accept the implications of natural science and press on toward a philosophy conflicting with the ideas of the universe cherished by their fathers. {58} CHAPTER V THE ORIGINS OF CHRISTIANITY Let us now pass from the study of the general features of the ancient outlook upon nature to a study of the Christian view of the world. Is the Christian view of the world inseparably bound up with this ancient outlook, or can it be purged of it? Is the moral fervor and idealism of Christianity its essential and permanent contribution, a contribution to a rational appreciation of human life? Probing still deeper, let us not be afraid to ask ourselves whether the surgery which this thesis implies does not involve the daring of a break with theism as only a developed form of primitive animism? In ethical monotheism, may not the _monotheism_ be the protecting envelope from which the butterfly has already flown?