Marxist revolution, Bebel tells us, differs from all its predecessors in this, that it does not seek for new forms of religion, but denies religion altogether. ‘The first word of religion,’ wrote Friedrich Engels, ‘is a lie’. ‘The idea of God’, said Marx, ‘must be destroyed; it is the keystone of perverted civilisation’. ‘It is useless’, adds Bax, ‘blinking the fact that the Christian doctrine is more revolting to the higher moral sense of today than the Saturnalia of the cult of Proserpina could have been to the conscience of the early Christians’; and elsewhere: ‘In what sense socialism is not religion will now be clear. It utterly despises “the other world”, with all its stage properties—that is, the present objects of religion’.

The only claim, in short, that the Revolution of Karl Marx has ever made to religious recognition is that it ‘brings religion from Heaven to earth’. But its major prophets have never been so rash as to promise the translation of Heaven itself to earth. On the contrary the convert to Marx’s materialist dialectic has been heard to put it to the latter’s credit that it has no dope to offer the faithful, no pie whether in the shy or on earth. Herein lies the appeal of the revolution to asceticism. And we cannot deny that the revolution has had an abundance of witnesses, in men and women singularly devoid of self-gratification. The old inevitable gibe about communists foregathering at the sea-side like lords’ and having cars, as other men,