George Tyrrell, an important writer on the spiritual life, prophesied this five years before the First World War:

“At present the world that is heard and seen in public, elated with the success of science and the triumphs of invention, confident that what has done so much will do everything, is blind to the appalling residue of human misery and to the insoluble problems that are coming up slowly like storm-clouds on the horizon”

Christianity at the Crossroads (1909).