"And this cannot be otherwise. An Imperialist nation cannot have an Imperialist Religion too, otherwise the heads of that Religion would run the Empire. The English, in the interest of their Empire, disintegrated their ancient Religion. In other words, they were bound to obscure Apollo and to degrade Dionysus by eccentricities.
"Take the Unitarians. Unable to find place for Dionysus in their over-rationalised Religion, they rush into moral eccentricities, such as a wholesale condemnation of war, a sickly philanthropy that yet seldom leaves the precincts of words, and other morbid habits.
"In England, Religion cannot be allowed its full-fledged growth. Should the English lose their Empire and, which is doubtful, yet survive as a small island-state, they will forthwith change their Religions, and the first of these to be dropped will be Anglicanism; while Methodism, in one of its extremer forms, is the most likely to replace all the others, should Catholicism not supplant it.
"The only new Christian Religion likely to arise in the British Empire is one in India, which will stand to British Christianity as the Greek Church stands to the Roman. I wonder why one or another of the British missionaries has not developed it long ago.
"In Great Britain herself a powerful new Religion cannot be devised as yet.
"It is quite different on the Continent; and it is devoutly to be hoped that France will shake off her torpor and pour new religious enthusiasm into the soul of her nation.
"It is also to be hoped that the Japanese will at last adopt a Religion fitting their new status as a great nation. They will never accept Protestantism. They may accept some new form of Romanism, in that the great distance of Rome from Tokio guarantees them from too much interference, and because their next objective, the thousands of islands called the Philippines, have long been converted to Romanism.
"I have, in my travels on earth, frequently been asked whether our own beautiful Religion could not be revived again.
"To this the answer can hardly be doubtful. Our Religion was so intimately connected with our peculiar polity that unless such polities should be revived, our Religion cannot be reintroduced into the life of nations.
"In my Republic I have anticipated most of the political communities that have arisen after my death; and the Roman Church has fully confirmed my prediction, that the polity in which philosophers will be kings will be the most abiding of all. The restrictions which I placed on the various classes of my ideal Republic have not been literally observed by the Roman Church; she has laid upon them other restrictions.