American “J’Accuse”

lead people to behave nicely, not kill each other off, and to find life bearable. This is to write about religion as a man born blind might write about color. For what we end up with, of course, is merely the cult of the bitch goddess of Success.

Mr. Toynbee’s analysis of man’s present politico-religious predicament, his prediction as to how man will extricate himself from it, and his religious “message” are pretty much what, in this context, we should expect. As the Machiavelli of The Prince was the prophet-planner of a united Italy, so the Toynbee of this book is the prophet-planner of the universal, one-religion, one-political theory Liberal welfare state. The “control of atomic weapons,” he writes, “is bound to be unified in the hands of some single authority sooner or later”; and we can “foresee that when world-government does come, the need for it will have become so desperate that Mankind will not only be ready to accept it even at the most exorbitantly high price in terms of loss of liberty, but will deify it and its human embodiments.”

ER

About the Author

E. Merrill Root

Featured Tags

lead people to behave nicely, not kill each other off, and to find life bearable. This is to write about religion as a man born blind might write about color. For what we end up with, of course, is merely the cult of the bitch goddess of Success.

Mr. Toynbee’s analysis of man’s present politico-religious predicament, his prediction as to how man will extricate himself from it, and his religious “message” are pretty much what, in this context, we should expect. As the Machiavelli of The Prince was the prophet-planner of a united Italy, so the Toynbee of this book is the prophet-planner of the universal, one-religion, one-political theory Liberal welfare state. The “control of atomic weapons,” he writes, “is bound to be unified in the hands of some single authority sooner or later”; and we can “foresee that when world-government does come, the need for it will have become so desperate that Mankind will not only be ready to accept it even at the most exorbitantly high price in terms of loss of liberty, but will deify it and its human embodiments.”