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Does civilization need religion?

Chapter 11: FOOTNOTES
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About This Book

This work analyzes religion's role in modern society, arguing that faith both defends human personality against the impersonal forces of science and industrial civilization and suffers decline from secularization and internal maladjustment. It outlines religion's social resources—ethical formation, communal solidarity, and transcendent meaning—while diagnosing its conservative limits and difficulties in addressing complex collective ethics. The author examines the tensions and compromises between religious claims and modern life, the ethical impotence produced by social complexity, and possible ways religion might transcend and transform secular institutions. The conclusion proposes a philosophical basis for an ethical religion that renews moral authority without reverting to rigid orthodoxy.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Professor Alfred Whitehead, in his Science and the Modern World and Religion in the Making, indicates the inevitable anti-mechanistic trend of philosophical thought as it achieves mastery of the varied fields of modern science.

[2] Prospects of Industrial Civilization, page 218.

[3] Matthew v. 43–48.

[4] The Decline of the West.

[5] Stuart Mill’s refutation of LePlay’s thesis that the salvation of the working classes can come only through the benevolence of their superiors is worth quoting in this connection: “No times can be pointed out in which the higher classes of this or any other country performed a part even distantly resembling the one assigned to them in this theory. All privileged and powerful classes have used their power in the interest of their own selfishness. I do not affirm that what has always been must always be. This at least seems to be undeniable, that long before superior classes could be sufficiently inspired to govern in the tutelary manner supposed, the inferior classes would be too much improved to be governed.”

[6] Gesammelte Aufsaetze zur Religions-Sociologie.

[7] Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.

[8] Quoted by Tawney, op. cit.

[9] The relation of puritanism to modern capitalism has been most exhaustively treated by Max Weber in his essay on “Die Protestantische Ethic und der Geist des Kapitalismus.”

[10] Quoted in Southey’s Life of Wesley, Chapter xxix.

[11] Both Max Weber and E. Troeltsch make much of the relation of Calvinism to medieval asceticism. See Max Weber, op. cit., and E. Troeltsch, Sociallehren der Christlichen Kirche.

[12] Romans vii. 19–25.

[13] Grosser Sermon vom Wucher (Werke, Vol. IV, page 49).

[14] Article 3 in Twelve Articles, quoted by J. S. Shapiro in Social Reform and the Reformation.

[15] In his Education of Henry Adams, Chapter x.

[16] Commenting on the first Hague conference Count Holstein of the German foreign office made some realistic observations which may not have justified his obstructive conclusions but which are nevertheless pertinent. He wrote: “Subjects of international law are states and not individuals. It will therefore be formally difficult and practically impossible to isolate the individual judge from the passions and interests of the whole in a way that happens or is supposed to happen in private law. Of all conceivable judges Great Powers are least disinterested, for in every conceivable question of any importance that may come up all Great Powers are interested à un degre quelconque. An impartial decision is therefore excluded by the nature of things.... Small disinterested states as subjects, small questions as objects of arbitral decision are conceivable; great states and great questions are not.” (Quoted by Dickinson in International Anarchy, p. 351.)

[17] Social Evolution, page 140.

[18] James iv. 2–4.

[19] II Corinthians iv. 16.

[20] In Civilization and Ethics and The Decay and Restoration of Civilization.

[21] Christianity and Other World Religions.

[22] Religion in the Making, page 50.

[23] George Santayana in Religion and Reason, page 176.

[24] In Development and Purpose, page 360.

[25] In Religion in the Making.