The same is now taking place in our humanity in the transition from the pagan conception of life to the Christian, which is now going on. The social man of our time is brought by life itself to the necessity of renouncing the pagan conception of life, which is no longer proper for the present age of humanity, and of submitting to the demands of the Christian teaching, the truths of which, no matter how distorted and misinterpreted they may be, are still known to him and alone furnish a solution to those contradictions in which he is losing himself.
If the demands of the Christian teaching seem strange and even perilous to the man of the social life-conception, the demands of the social teaching anciently seemed just as incomprehensible and perilous to a savage, when he did not yet fully comprehend them and was unable to foresee their consequences.
“It is irrational for me to sacrifice my peace or even my life,” says the savage, “in order to defend something incomprehensible, intangible, conventional—the family, the race, the country, and, above all else, it is dangerous to give myself over to the disposition of a foreign power.”
But the time came when the savage, on the one hand, comprehended, however dimly, the significance of the social life, the significance of its prime mover—the public approval or condemnation—glory; on the other hand, when the sufferings of his personal life became so great that he no longer continued to believe in the truth of his former conception of life, and accepted the social, the political teaching and submitted to it.
The same now takes place with the social, the political man.
“It is irrational for me,” says the social man, “to sacrifice my good, the good of my family, my country, for the fulfilment of the conditions of some higher law, which demands from me the renunciation of the most natural and the best sentiments of love for myself, my family, my country, and, above all, it is dangerous to reject the security of life, which is given by the political structure.”