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The French alliance during our Revolution, and our close intercourse with France immediately afterward, hastened among us the introduction of certain French writers who were assailants of Christianity, and who soon set up among the younger and perhaps brighter men of the country the fashion of casting off, as parts of an outworn and pitiful superstition, the religious ideas of their childhood, and even the morality which had found its strongest sanctions in those ideas.
Its chief glory, however, that of a devotional classic, has been somewhat dimmed by Luther himself, who with the carelessness of genius refused to revise his outworn views in it; and yet, despite its relics of mediævalism, particularly by reason of its firm evangelical foundation, its scriptural warp and woof, its fervent piety, and its fresh and original treatment, it is not less entitled to a high place in the devotional and ascetic literature of the Church than the much better known Imitatio Christi.
If he seeks to align himself with the future, he must assume a condition of some sort for a world fifty years beyond his own. Every historian sometimes unconsciously, but always inevitably must have put to himself the question: How long could such-or-such an outworn system last? He can never give himself less than one generation to show the full effects of a changed condition.
Industrial crises follow each other with increasing severity and the masses are becoming more and more pauperized. The growth of fascism and war is the attempt of this outworn capitalist system to keep in existence although history has imperatively summoned it to leave the stage and to make way for the next order, socialism.
Miss Francis and Preblesham, at opposite ends of the intellectual scale, both maundering on about doing the Will of God and General Thario talking about marks on foreheads what sort of feebleminded, retrogressive world was I living in? All the outworn superstitions of religion taking hold of people and intruding themselves into otherwise normal conversation.
"But a man must live some way!" pleaded the poor fellow in his extremity. "I do not see the necessity," was the weary reply. Preachers must live; their education and environment have unfitted them for useful effort; but they are a part of the great, seething struggle for existence. And so we have their piteous and plaintive plea for the obsolete and the outworn.
The misery of the whole thing was too dreadful to her! The lantern itself must, she thought, have been made when the invention was in its infancy, and its pictured slides seemed the remnants of various outworn series. Those of the Rake's Progress were something too hideous and lamentable to be dwelt upon.
Then in their midst Atreus' son lifted up his hands and prayed aloud: "Father Zeus, that rulest from Ida, most glorious, most great, and thou Sun that seest all things and hearest all things, and ye Rivers and thou Earth, and ye that in the underworld punish men outworn, whosoever sweareth falsely; be ye witnesses, and watch over the faithful oath.
It sought to exchange for the romantic barbarism which had underlain so much that was picturesque in the sixteenth century a barbarism which had come down from the late Middle Ages, and which was really a dissolution of strong things outworn to exchange for this a preciousness of quality as against mere rude bulk.
Life, active life, life of his own day, called to him; he had been one of its busiest children: could he turn his back upon it for any charm or use that was in the past? Again that unnerving doubt, that paralysing distrust, beset him, and tempted him to curse the day in which he had returned to this outworn Old World.
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