THE IDEA OF PROGRESS
I
The supposition that fish do not recognize the existence of water nor
birds the existence of air often has been used to illustrate the
insensitive unawareness of which we all are capable in the presence of
some encompassing medium of our lives. The illustration aptly fits the
minds of multitudes in this generation, who live, as we all do, in the
atmosphere of progressive hopes and yet are not intelligently aware of it
nor conscious of its newness, its strangeness and its penetrating
influence. We read as a matter of course such characteristic lines as
these from Tennyson:
"Yet I doubt not thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widen'd with the process of the suns."
Such lines, however, are not to be taken as a matter of course; until
comparatively recent generations such an idea as that never had dawned on
anybody's mind, and the story of the achievement of that progressive
interpretation of history is one of the most fascinating narratives in
the long record of man's mental Odyssey. In particular, the Christian
who desires to understand the influences, both intellectual and
practical, which are playing with transforming power upon Christianity
today, upon its doctrines, its purposes, its institutions, and its social
applications, must first of all understand the idea of progress. For
like a changed climate, which in time alters the fauna and flora of a
continent beyond the power of human conservatism to resist, this
progressive conception of life is affecting every thought and purpose of
man, and no attempted segregation of religion from its influence is
likely to succeed.
The significance of this judgment becomes the more clear when we note the
fact that the idea of progress in our modern sense is not to be found
before the sixteenth century. Men before that time had lived without
progressive hopes just as before Copernicus they had lived upon a
stationary earth. Man's life was not thought of as a growth; gradual
change for the better was not supposed to be God's method with mankind;
the future was not conceived in terms of possible progress; and man's
estate on earth was not looked upon as capable of indefinite
perfectibility. All these ideas, so familiar to us, were undreamed of in
the ancient and medieval world. The new astronomy is not a more complete
break from the old geocentric system with its stationary earth than is
our modern progressive way of thinking from our fathers' static
conception of human life and history.
It will be worth our while at the beginning of our study to review in
outline this development of the idea of progress, that we may better
understand the reasons for its emergence and may more truly estimate its
revolutionary effects. In the ancient world the Greeks, with all their
far-flung speculations, never hit upon the idea of progress. To be sure,
clear intimations, scattered here and there in Greek literature, indicate
faith that man in the past had improved his lot. Aeschylus saw men
lifted from their hazardous lives in sunless caves by the intervention of
Prometheus and his sacrificial teaching of the arts of peace; Euripides
contrasted the primitive barbarism in which man began with the civilized
estate which in Greece he had achieved—but this perceived advance never
was erected into a progressive idea of human life as a whole. Rather,
the original barbarism, from which the arts of civilization had for a
little lifted men, was itself a degeneration from a previous ideal
estate, and human history as a whole was a cyclic and repetitious story
of never-ending rise and fall. Plato's philosophy of history was
typical: the course of cosmic life is divided into cycles, each
seventy-two thousand solar years in length; during the first half of each
cycle, when creation newly comes from the hands of Deity, mankind's
estate is happily ideal, but then decay begins and each cycle's latter
half sinks from bad to worse until Deity once more must take a hand and
make all things new again. Indeed, so far from reaching the idea of
progress, the ancient Greeks at the very center of their thinking were
incapacitated for such an achievement by their suspiciousness of change.
They were artists and to them the perfect was finished, like the
Parthenon, and therefore was incapable of being improved by change.
Change, so far from meaning, as it does with us, the possibility of
betterment, meant with them the certainty of decay; no changes upon earth
in the long run were good; all change was the sure sign that the period
of degeneration had set in from which only divine intervention could
redeem mankind. Paul on Mars Hill quoted the Greek poet Aratus
concerning the sonship of all mankind to God, but Aratus's philosophy of
history is not so pleasantly quotable:
"How base a progeny sprang from golden sires!
And viler shall they be whom ye beget." [1]
Such, in general, was the non-progressive outlook of the ancient Greeks.
Nor did the Romans hit upon the idea of progress in any form remotely
approaching our modern meaning. The casual reader, to be sure, will find
occasional flares of expectancy about the future or of pride in the
advance of the past which at first suggest progressive interpretations of
history. So Seneca, rejoicing because he thought he knew the explanation
of the moon's eclipses, wrote: "The days will come when those things
which now lie hidden time and human diligence will bring to light. . . .
The days will come when our posterity will marvel that we were ignorant
of truths so obvious." [2] So, too, the Epicureans, like the Greek
tragedians before them, believed that human knowledge and effort had
lifted mankind out of primitive barbarism and Lucretius described how man
by the development of agriculture and navigation, the building of cities
and the establishment of laws, the manufacture of physical conveniences
and the creation of artistic beauty, had risen, "gradually progressing,"
to his present height.[3] Such hopeful changes in the past, however, were
not the prophecies of continuous advance; they were but incidental
fluctuations in a historic process which knew no progress as a whole.
Even the Stoics saw in history only a recurrent rise and fall in endless
repetition so that all apparent change for good or evil was but the
influx or the ebbing of the tide in an essentially unchanging sea. The
words of Marcus Aurelius are typical: "The periodic movements of the
universe are the same, up and down from age to age"; "He who has seen
present things has seen all, both everything which has taken place from
all eternity and everything which will be for time without end; for all
are of one kin and of one form"; "He who is forty years old, if he has
any understanding at all, has, by virtue of the uniformity that prevails,
seen all things which have been and all that will be." [4]
When with these Greek and Roman ideas the Hebrew-Christian influences
blended, no conception of progress in the modern sense was added by the
Church's contribution. To be sure, the Christians' uncompromising faith
in personality as the object of divine redemption and their vigorous hope
about the future of God's people in the next world, if not in this,
calcined some elements in the classical tradition. Belief in cycles,
endlessly repeating themselves through cosmic ages, went by the board.
This earth became the theatre of a unique experiment made once for all;
in place of the ebb and flow of tides in a changeless sea, mankind's
story became a drama moving toward a climactic denouement that would
shake heaven and earth together in a divine cataclysm. But this
consummation of all history was not a goal progressively to be achieved;
it was a divine invasion of the world expectantly to be awaited, when the
victorious Christ would return and the Day of Judgment dawn.
The development of this apocalyptic phrasing of hope has been traced too
often to require long rehearsal here. If the Greeks were essentially
philosophers and welcomed congenially ideas like endless cosmic cycles,
the Hebrews were essentially practical and dramatic in their thinking and
they welcomed a picture of God's victory capable of being visualized by
the imagination. At first their national hopes had been set on the
restoration of the Davidic kingdom; then the Davidic king himself had
grown in their imagination until, as Messiah in a proper sense, he
gathered to himself supernal attributes; then, as a child of their
desperate national circumstances, the hope was born of their Messiah's
sudden coming on the clouds of heaven for their help. Between the
Testaments this expectation expanded and robed itself with pomp and
glory, so that when the Christians came they found awaiting them a
phrasing of hope which they accepted to body forth their certainty of
God's coming sovereignty over all the earth. This expectation of coming
triumph was not progressive; it was cataclysmic. It did not offer the
prospect of great gains to be worked for over long periods of time; it
offered a divine invasion of history immediately at hand. It was
pictured, not in terms of human betterment to be achieved, but of divine
action to be awaited. The victory would suddenly come like the flood in
Noah's day, like the lightning flashing from one end of the heaven to the
other, like a thief in the night.
To be sure, this eager expectation of a heavenly kingdom immediately to
arrive on earth soon grew dim among the Christians, and the reasons are
obvious. For one thing, the Church herself, moving out from days of
hardship to days of preferment and prosperity, began to allure with her
inviting prospects of growing power the enthusiasms and hopes of the
people, until not the suddenly appearing kingdom from the heavens, but
the expanding Church on earth became the center of Christian interest.
For another thing, Christ meant more to Christians than the inaugurator
of a postponed kingdom which, long awaited with ardent expectation, still
did not arrive; Christ was the giver of eternal life now. More and more
the emphasis shifted from what Christ would do for his people when he
came upon the clouds of heaven to what he was doing for them through his
spiritual presence with them. Even in the Fourth Gospel one finds this
good news that Christ had already come again in the hearts of his people
insisted on in evident contrast with the apocalyptic hope literally
conceived. For another thing, dramatic hopes of a sudden invasion of the
world are always the offspring of desperate conditions. Only when people
are hard put to it do they want history catastrophically stopped in the
midst of its course. The Book of Daniel must be explained by the
tyrannies of Antiochus Epiphanes, the Book of Revelation by the
persecutions of Domitian, the present recrudescence of pre-millennialism
by the tragedy of the Great War. But when the persecution of the Church
by the State gave way to the running of the State by the Church; when to
be a Christian was no longer a road to the lions but the sine qua non of
preferment and power; when the souls under the altar ceased crying, "How
long, O Master, the holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our
blood on them that dwell on the earth?" then the apocalyptic hopes grew
dim and the old desire for a kingdom immediately to come was subdued to
an expectation, no longer imperative and urgent, that sometime the course
of history would stop on Judgment Day.
In all these Greek and Roman, Hebrew and Christian contributions, which
flowed together and then flowed out into the medieval age, there was no
suggestion of a modern idea of progress, and in the medieval age itself
there was nothing to create a fresh phrasing of expectancy. Men were
aware of the darkness of the days that had fallen on the earth; even when
they began to rouse themselves from their lethargy, their thoughts of
greatness did not reach forward toward a golden age ahead but harked back
"To the glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome,"
and their intellectual life, instead of being an adventurous search for
new truth, was a laborious endeavour to stabilize the truth already
formulated in the great days of the early Church. Indeed, the Church's
specific contribution of a vividly imagined faith in a future world, as
the goal of the most absorbing hopes and fears of men, tended rather to
confirm than to dissipate the static conception of earthly life and
history. With an urgency that the ancient world had never known the
Christian world believed in immortality and visualized the circumstances
of the life to come so concretely that in a medieval catechism the lurid
colour of the setting sun was ascribed to the supposition that "he
looketh down upon hell." [5] Nothing in this life had any importance
save as it prepared the souls of men for life to come. Even Roger Bacon,
his mind flashing like a beacon from below the sky-line of the modern
world, was sure that all man's knowledge of nature was useful only in
preparing his soul to await the coming of Antichrist and the Day of
Judgment. There was no idea of progress, then, in the medieval age.
Human life and history were static and the only change to be anticipated
was the climactic event
"When earth breaks up and heaven expands."
The emergence of modern progressive hopes out of this static medievalism
is one of the epic occurrences of history. The causes which furthered
the movement seem now in retrospect to be woven into a fabric so tightly
meshed as to resist unraveling. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to see
at least some of the major factors which furthered this revolutionary
change from a static to a progressive world.
Among the first, scientific invention is surely to be noted. Even Roger
Bacon, prophecying with clairvoyant insight far in advance of the event,
foresaw one of the determining factors of the modern age: "Machines for
navigating can be made so that without rowers great ships can be guided
by one pilot on river or sea more swiftly than if they were full of
oarsmen. Likewise vehicles are possible which without draught-animals
can be propelled with incredible speed, like the scythed chariots, as we
picture them, in which antiquity fought. Likewise a flying machine is
possible in the middle of which a man may sit, using some ingenious
device by which artificial wings will beat the air like those of a flying
bird. Also machines, small in size, can be constructed to lift and move
unlimited weights, than which in an emergency nothing is more useful."
[6] So dreamed the great friar in the thirteenth century. When, then,
we find the minds of men first throwing off their intellectual vassalage
to antiquity and beginning to believe in themselves, their present powers
and their future prospects, it is this new-found mastery over nature's
latent resources which is the spring and fountain of their confidence.
Cardan, in the sixteenth century, marveling at the then modern inventions
of the compass, the printing press, and gunpowder, cried, "All antiquity
has nothing comparable to these three things." [7] Every year from that
day to this has deepened the impression made upon the minds of men by the
marvelous prospect of harnessing the resources of the universe. The last
one hundred and twenty-five years have seen the invention of the
locomotive, the steamship, the telegraph, the sewing machine, the camera,
the telephone, the gasoline engine, wireless telegraphy and telephony,
and the many other applications of electricity. As one by one new areas
of power have thus come under the control of man, with every conquest
suggesting many more not yet achieved but brought within range of
possibility, old theories of cosmic degeneration and circular futility
have gone to pieces, the glamour of antiquity has lost its allurement,
the great days of humanity upon the earth have been projected into the
future, and the gradual achievement of human progress has become the hope
of man.
Another element in the emergence of the modern progressive outlook upon
life is immediately consequent upon the first: world-wide discovery,
exploration and intercommunication. Great as the practical results have
been which trace their source to the adventurers who, from Columbus down,
pioneered unknown seas to unknown lands, the psychological effects have
been greater still. Who could longer live cooped up in a static world,
when the old barriers were so being overpassed and new continents were
inviting adventure, settlement, and social experiment hitherto untried?
The theological progressiveness of the Pilgrim Fathers, starting out from
Leyden for a new world, was not primarily a matter of speculation; it was
even more a matter of an adventurous spirit, which, once admitted into
life, could not be kept out of religious thought as well. In Edward
Winslow's account of Pastor Robinson's last sermon before the little
company of pioneers left Leyden, we read that Robinson "took occasion
also miserably to bewaile the state and condition of the Reformed
Churches, who were come to a period in Religion, and would goe no further
than the instruments of their Reformation: As for example, the
Lutherans they could not be drawne to goe beyond what Luther saw, for
whatever part of God's will he had further imparted and revealed to
Calvin, they will die rather than embrace it. And so also, saith he,
you see the Calvinists, they stick where he left them: a misery much to
bee lamented; For though they were precious shining lights in their
times, yet God hath not revealed his whole will to them: And were they
now living, saith hee, they would bee as ready and willing to embrace
further light, as that they had received." [8] Static methods of
thinking are here evidently going to pieces before the impact of a
distinctly unstatic world. They were looking for "more truth and light
yet to breake forth out of his holy Word" [9] because they lived in a
time when new things had been happening at an exhilarating rate and when
pioneering adventure and general travel in a world of open avenues were
already beginning to have that liberating effect which has increased with
every passing century.
Closely allied with the two elements already noted is a third: the
increase of knowledge, which, as in the case of astronomy, threw
discredit upon the superior claims of antiquity and made modern men seem
wiser than their sires. For ages the conviction had held the ground that
the ancients were the wisest men who ever lived and that we, their
children, were but infants in comparison. When, therefore, the
Copernican astronomy proved true, when the first terrific shock of it had
passed through resultant anger into wonder and from wonder into stupefied
acceptance, and from that at last into amazed exultation at the vast, new
universe unveiled, the credit of antiquity received a stunning blow. So
far was Aristotle from being "the master of those who know" whom the
medievalists had revered, that he had not even known the shape and motion
of the earth or its relation with the sun. For the first time in history
the idea emerged that humanity accumulates knowledge, that the ancients
were the infants, that the moderns represent the age and wisdom of the
race. Consider the significance of those words of Pascal in the
seventeenth century: "Those whom we call ancient were really new in all
things, and properly constituted the infancy of mankind; and as we have
joined to their knowledge the experience of the centuries which have
followed them, it is in ourselves that we should find this antiquity that
we revere in others." [10] For the first time in history men turned
their faces, in their search for knowledge, not backward but forward, and
began to experience that attitude which with us is habitual—standing on
tip-toe in eager expectancy, sure that tomorrow some new and unheard of
truth will be revealed.
New inventions, new discoveries, new knowledge—even before the
eighteenth century all these factors were under way. Then a new factor
entered which has played a powerful part in substituting a progressive
for a static world: new social hopes. The medieval age had no
expectation of a better social life on earth. Charity was common but it
was purely individual and remedial; it did not seek to understand or to
cure the causes of social maladjustment; it was sustained by no
expectation of better conditions among men; it was valued because of the
giver's unselfishness rather than because of the recipient's gain, and in
consequence it was for the most part unregulated alms-giving, piously
motived but inefficiently managed. In the eighteenth century a new
outlook and hope emerged. If man could pioneer new lands, learn new
truth and make new inventions, why could he not devise new social systems
where human life would be freed from the miseries of misgovernment and
oppression? With that question at last definitely rising, the long line
of social reformers began which stretched from Abbé de Saint-Pierre to
the latest believer in the possibility of a more decent and salutary
social life for human-kind. The coming of democracy in government
incalculably stimulated the influence of this social hope, for with the
old static forms of absolute autocracy now broken up, with power in the
hands of the people to seek as they would "life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness," who could put limits to the possibilities? The medieval
age was gone; the modern age had come, and its distinctive note was
progress, with new inventions, new discoveries, new knowledge and new
social hope.
It would be a fascinating task to watch these interweaving factors at
their work and to trace their commingled influence as slowly their
involved significance became clear, now to this man and now to that. The
best narrative that has been written yet of this epochal movement is
contained in Professor Bury's volume on "The Idea of Progress." There one
sees the stream of this progressive conception of life pushing its way
out as through a delta by way of many minds, often far separated yet
flowing with the same water. Some men attacked the ancients and by
comparison praised the modern time as Perrault did with "The Age of Louis
the Great"; some men foresaw so clearly the possibility of man's control
over nature that they dreamed of terrestrial Utopias as Francis Bacon did
in "New Atlantis"; some men, like Descartes, sought to grasp the
intellectual conditions of human improvement; and others, like Condorcet,
became the fervid prophets of human perfectibility; some, like Turgot,
re-examined history in terms of the new ideas; and some, like Saint Simon
and Comte, sought to discover the law by which all progress moves. This
new idea of life and history came "by divers portions and in divers
manners," but no one can doubt its arrival. The life of man upon this
earth was no longer conceived as static; it was progressive and the
possibilities that lay ahead made all the achievements of the past seem
like the play of childhood.
At last, in the nineteenth century, the climactic factor was added which
gathered up all the rest and embraced them in a comprehensive philosophy
of life. Evolution became a credible truth. No longer a dim conjecture,
it was established in biology, and then it spread its influence out into
every area of human thought until all history was conceived in genetic
terms and all the sciences were founded upon the evolutionary idea.
Growth became recognized as the fundamental law of life. Nothing in the
universe without, or in man's life within, could longer be conceived as
having sprung full-statured, like Minerva from the head of Jove. All
things achieved maturity by gradual processes. The world itself had thus
come into being, not artificially nailed together like a box, but growing
like a tree, putting forth ever new branches and new leaves. When this
idea had firmly grasped the human mind, the modern age had come indeed,
and progress was its distinctive category of understanding and its
exhilarating phrasing of human hope. Then came the days of mid-Victorian
optimism with songs like this upon men's lips:
"Every tiger madness muzzled, every serpent passion kill'd,
Every grim ravine a garden, every blazing desert till'd,
"Robed in universal harvest up to either pole she smiles,
Universal ocean softly washing all her warless isles." [11]
Any one, however, who has lived with discerning thought through the
opening years of the twentieth century, must be aware that something has
happened to chasten and subdue these wildly enthusiastic hopes of the
mid-Victorian age. Others beside the "gloomy dean" of St. Paul's,
whether through well-considered thought or through the psychological
shock of the Great War, have come to look upon this rash, unmitigated
enthusiasm about the earth's future as a fool's paradise. At any rate,
no treatment of the idea of progress would be complete which did not
dwell upon the limitations to that idea, now definitely obvious to
thoughtful men.
As early as 1879, in Saporta's "Le Monde des Plantes," we run upon one
serious setback to unqualified expectations of progress. Men began to
take into account the fact that this earth is not a permanent affair.
"We recognize from this point of view as from others," wrote Saporta,
"that the world was once young; then adolescent; that it has even passed
the age of maturity; man has come late, when a beginning of physical
decadence had struck the globe, his domain." [12] Here is a fact to give
enthusiasm over earthly progress serious pause. This earth, once
uninhabitable, will be uninhabitable again. If not by wholesale
catastrophe, then by the slow wearing down of the sun's heat, already
passed its climacteric, this planet, the transient theatre of the human
drama, will be no longer the scene of man's activity, but as cold as the
moon, or as hot as colliding stars in heaven, will be able to sustain
human life no more. "The grandest material works of the human race,"
wrote Faye in 1884, "will have to be effaced by degrees under the action
of a few physical forces which will survive man for a time. Nothing will
remain, not even the ruins." [13]
Every suggested clew to a possible escape from the grimness of the
planet's dissolution has been followed up with careful search. The
discovery of radioactivity seemed to promise endlessly extended life to
our sun, but Sir E. Rutherford, before the Royal Astronomical Society,
has roundly denied that the discovery materially lengthens our estimate
of the sun's tenure of life and has said that if the sun were made of
uranium it would not because of that last five years the longer as a
giver of heat.[14] Whether we will or not, we have no choice except to
face the tremendous fact, calmly set down by von Hartmann in 1904: "The
only question is whether . . . the world-process will work itself out
slowly in prodigious lapse of time, according to purely physical laws; or
whether it will find its end by means of some metaphysical resource when
it has reached its culminating point. Only in the last case would its
end coincide with the fulfilment of a purpose or object; in the first
case, a long period of purposeless existence would follow after the
culmination of life." [15]
In a word, men delighted at the prospect of human progress on this planet
have made an idol of it, only to discover that on a transient earth it
leads nowhere without God and immortality. One disciple of naturalism
recently denied his desire to believe in God because he wanted a risky
universe. But the universe without God is not risky; it is a foregone
conclusion; the dice are all loaded. After the lapse of millions of
years which, however long they be stretched out, will ultimately end, our
solar system will be gone, without even a memory left of anything that
ever was dreamed or done within it. That is the inevitable issue of such
a "risky" universe. When scientifically-minded men, therefore, now take
a long look ahead, the Utopian visions of the mid-Victorian age are not
foremost in their thought. Rather, as one of them recently wrote:
"One is tempted to imagine this race of supermen, of some millions of
years hence, grimly confronting the issue of extinction. Probably long
before that time science will have perfectly mastered the problem of the
sun's heat, and will be able to state precisely at what period the
radiation will sink to a level which would normally be fatal to the
living inhabitants of the planets. Then will begin the greatest of
cosmic events: a drama that has doubtless been played numbers of times
already on the stage of the universe: the last stand of the wonderful
microcosm against the brute force of the macrocosm. . . . .
"One conceives that our supermen will face the end philosophically.
Death is losing its terrors. The race will genially say, as we
individuals do to-day, that it has had a long run. But it will
none-the-less make a grim fight. Life will be worth living, for
everybody, long before that consummation is in sight. The hovering demon
of cold and darkness will be combatted by scientific means of which we
have not the germ of a conception." [16]
If ever a river ran out into a desert, the river of progressive hopes,
fed only from springs of materialistic philosophy, has done so here. At
least the Greeks had their immortality and the Hebrews their coming
Kingdom of God, but a modern materialist, with all his talk of progress,
has neither the one nor the other, nor anything to take their place as an
ultimate for hope. Whatever else may be true, progress on a transient
planet has not done away with the need of God and life eternal.
Moreover, not only have our twentieth century thought and experience
seriously qualified the meaning of progress on this earth by the limiting
of the earth's duration; men have come also to distrust, as a quite
unjustified flourish of sentimentality, the mid-Victorian confidence in
an automatic evolution which willy-nilly lifts humanity to higher levels.
Said Herbert Spencer, "Progress is not an accident, not a thing within
human control, but a beneficent necessity." "This advancement is due to
the working of a universal law; . . . in virtue of that law it must
continue until the state we call perfection is reached. . . . Thus the
ultimate development of the ideal man is logically certain—as certain as
any conclusion in which we place the most implicit faith; . . . so surely
must the things we call evil and immorality disappear; so surely must man
become perfect." [17] There is no scientific basis whatever for such a
judgment. Evolution is not an escalator which, whether or not man run in
addition to its lift, will inevitably raise humanity to a heaven on
earth. Potatoes in the cellar shooting out long white eyes in search of
light are evolving, but they are evolving worse. Upon the basis of a
scientific doctrine of evolution, no idolatrous superstition could be
much more lacking in intellectual support than Spencer's confidence in a
universal, mechanical, irresistible movement toward perfection. The
plain fact is that human history is a strange blend of progress and
regress; it is the story of the rhythmic rise and fall of civilizations
and empires, of gains made only to be lost and lost only to be fought for
once again. Even when advance has come, it has come by mingled progress
and cataclysm as water passes, through gradual increase of warmth, from
ice suddenly to liquid and from liquid suddenly to vapour. Our
nineteenth century ideas of evolution tended to create in us the
impression that humanity had made a smooth and even ascent. We
artificially graded the ascending track of human history, leveled and
macadamized it, and talked of inevitable progress. Such sentimental
optimism has ceased even to be comforting, so utterly untenable has it
become to every well-instructed mind.
To such unfounded faith in automatic progress a valuable counterweight is
acquaintance with the life of a man like St. Augustine. As one reads
Augustine's sermons one can hear in the background the collapse of a
great civilization. One can tell from his discourses when the barbarians
began to move on Rome. One can hear the crash when Alaric and his hordes
sacked the Eternal City. One can catch the accent of horror at the tidal
waves of anarchy that everywhere swept in to engulf the falling empire.
"Horrible things," said Augustine, "have been told us. There have been
ruins, and fires, and rapine, and murder, and torture. That is true; we
have heard it many times; we have shuddered at all this disaster; we have
often wept, and we have hardly been able to console ourselves." [18] At
last, the empire in ruins, the old civilization tottering to its
collapse, Augustine died in his episcopal city of Hippo, while the
barbarians were hammering at the city gates. Through such scenes this
generation too has lived and has had to learn again, what we never should
have forgotten, that human history is not a smooth and well-rolled lawn
of soft ascents; that it is mountainous, precipitous, terrific—a country
where all progress must be won by dint of intelligence and toil, and
where it is as easy to lose the gains of civilization as it is to fall
over a cliff or to surrender a wheat field to the weeds. An archeologist
in Mesopotamia talked with an Arab lad who neither read, himself, nor
knew any one who did; yet the lad, when he acknowledged this, stood
within a stone's throw of the site where milleniums ago was one of the
greatest universities of the ancient world and where still, amid the
desolation, one could dig and find the old clay tablets on which the
children of that ancient time had learned to write. Progress? Regress!
While history as a whole, from the Cro-Magnon man to the twentieth
century, does certainly suggest a great ascent, it has not been an
automatic levitation. It has been a fight, tragic and ceaseless, against
destructive forces. This world needs something more than a soft gospel
of inevitable progress. It needs salvation from its ignorance, its sin,
its inefficiency, its apathy, its silly optimisms and its appalling
carelessness.
Nevertheless, though it is true that our modern ideas of progress on this
earth never in themselves can supply an adequate philosophy of life, and
though it is true that they do not dispense with, but rather emphasize,
our need of God and immortality and the saving powers which Christians
find in Christ, yet those ideas have in them a permanent contribution to
the life of man from whose influence the race cannot escape. When we
have granted the limitations which disillusioned thoughtfulness suggests
concerning progress upon this earth, it still remains true that, in our
new scientific control over the latent resources of the earth without and
over our own mental and moral processes within, we have a machinery for
producing change that opens up exciting prospects before humanity. Never
in our outlook upon man's earthly future can we go back to the endless
cosmic cycles of the Greeks or the apocalyptic expectations of the
Hebrews. We are committed to the hope of making progress, and the
central problem which Christianity faces in adjusting her thought and
practice to the modern age is the problem of coming to intelligent terms
with this dominant idea.
These lectures are an excursion to spy out this land and to see, if we
may, what the idea of progress through the scientific control of life is
likely to mean and ought to mean to Christianity. If this modern idea is
not intelligently guided in its effect upon our faith and practice, it
will none the less have its effect in haphazard, accidental, unguided,
and probably ruinous ways. If one listens, for example, to the preaching
of liberal ministers, one sees that every accent of their teaching has
been affected by this prevalent and permeating thought. The God they
preach no longer sits afar like Dante's deity in the stationary empyrean
beyond all reach of change; their God is here in the midst of the human
struggle, "their Captain in the well-fought fight." H. G. Wells may be a
poor theologian but he is one of our best interpreters of popular thought
and his idea of God, marching through the world "like fifes and drums,"
calling the people to a progressive crusade for righteousness, is one
which modern folk find it most easy to accept. He is a God of progress
who undergirds our endeavours for justice in the earth with his power;
who fights in and for and with us against the hosts of evil; whose
presence is a guarantee of ultimate victory; and whose effect upon us is
to send us out to war against ancient human curses, assured that what
ought to be done can be done.
As men's thought of God has thus been molded by the idea of progress on
the earth, so, too, the Christ they preach is not primarily, as of old,
the victim by whose substitutionary sacrifice the race of men has found
an open door from the bottomless pit of endless woe to a blessed
immortality in Paradise. The modern emphasis is all another way. Christ
is the divine revealer whose spirit alone can transform individuals and
save society. The sort of character he was, the life he lived, the ideas
he promulgated, are the salt that can preserve human life, the light that
can illumine the way to a kingdom of righteousness on earth. He himself
is the leader in the fight for that kingdom, his sacrifice part of the
price it costs, his spirit the quality of life that is indispensable to
its coming, and when we think of him we sing,
"The Son of God goes forth to war. . . .
Who follows in his train?"
So, too, the Church, as presented by typical modern preachers, is no
longer an ark to which, from the flood of wrath divine, the few may flee
for safety. If men tried to preach in that way, the message would stick
in their throats. The Church is primarily an instrument in God's hands
to bring personal and social righteousness upon the earth. When her
massed influence overcomes a public evil or establishes a public good,
men find the justification of her existence and a first-rate weapon of
apologetic argument in her behalf. When wars come, the Church is blamed
because she did not prevent them; when wars are over, she takes counsel
how she may prove the validity of her message by making their recurrence
impossible; and the pitiful dismemberment of the Church by sects and
schisms is hated and deplored, not so much because of economic waste or
theological folly, as because these insane divisions prevent social
effectiveness in bringing the message of Christ to bear influentially on
modern life.
Likewise, hope, deeply affected by modern ideas of earthly progress, is
not primarily post-mortem, as it used to be. Men believe in immortality,
but it seems so naturally the continuance of this present life that their
responsible concern is chiefly centered here. The hopes which waken
immediate enthusiasm and stir spontaneous response are hopes of
righteousness victorious upon the earth. Because men believe in God,
they believe that he has great purposes for humankind. The course of
human history is like a river: sometimes it flows so slowly that one
would hardly know it moved at all; sometimes bends come in its channel so
that one can hardly see in what direction it intends to go; sometimes
there are back-eddies so that it seems to be retreating on itself. If a
man has no spiritual interpretation of life, if he does not believe in
God, he may well give up hope and conclude that the human river is
flowing all awry or has altogether ceased to move. A Christian, however,
has a spiritual interpretation of life. He knows that human history is a
river—not a whirlpool, nor a pond, but a river flowing to its end. Just
as, far inland, we can tell that the Hudson is flowing to the sea,
because the waters, when the tide comes in, are tinctured with the
ocean's quality, so now, we believe that we can tell that the river of
human history is flowing out toward the kingdom of our God. Already the
setback of the divine ocean is felt among us in ideals of better life,
personal, social, economic, national. That it is Christianity's function
to believe in these ideals, to have faith in the possibility of their
realization, to supply motives for their achievement, and to work for
them with courage and sacrifice, is the familiar note of modern Christian
hope.
The modern apologetic also is tinctured with this same quality. Not as
of old is it a laboured working out of metaphysical propositions.
Rather, a modern Christian preacher's defense of the Gospel may be
paraphrased in some such strain as this: You never can achieve a decent
human life upon this planet apart from the Christian Gospel. Neither
outward economic comfort nor international treaties of peace can save the
day for humanity. Not even when our present situation is described as "a
race between education and catastrophe" has the case been adequately
stated. What kind of education is meant? If every man and woman on
earth were a Ph. D., would that solve the human problem? Aaron Burr had
a far keener intellect than George Washington. So far as swiftness and
agility of intelligence were concerned, Burr far out-distanced the
slow-pacing mind of Washington. But, for all that, as you watch Burr's
life, and many another's like him, you understand what Macaulay meant
when he exclaimed: "as if history were not made up of the bad actions of
extraordinary men, as if all the most noted destroyers and deceivers of
our species, all the founders of arbitrary governments and false
religions, had not been extraordinary men, as if nine tenths of the
calamities which have befallen the human race had any other origin than
the union of high intelligence with low desires." Was Nebuchadnezzar of
Babylon unintelligent? Caesar and Napoleon—were they unintelligent?
Has the most monumental and destructive selfishness in human history been
associated with poor minds? No, with great minds, which, if the world
was to be saved their devastation, needed to be reborn into a new spirit.
The transforming gospel which religion brings is indispensable to a
building of the kingdom of righteousness upon the earth.
Wherever one listens, then, to the typical teaching of modern Christians,
he finds himself in the atmosphere of the idea of progress. Men's
thoughts of God, of Christ, of the Church, of hope, their methods of
apologetic, are shaped to that mold—are often thinned out and flattened
down and made cheap and unconvincing by being shaped to that mold—so
that an endeavour to achieve an intelligent understanding of
Christianity's relationship with the idea of progress is in part a
defensive measure to save the Gospel from being unintelligently mauled
and mishandled by it. Marcus Dods, when he was an old man, said: "I do
not envy those who have to fight the battle of Christianity in the
twentieth century." Then, after a moment, he added, "Yes, perhaps I do,
but it will be a stiff fight." It is a stiff fight, and for this reason
if for no other, that before we can get on much further in a progressive
world we must achieve with wisdom and courage some fundamental
reconstructions in our Christian thinking.
[1] Aratus of Soli: Phaenomena, lines 122-3.
[2] Lucius Annaeus Seneca: Naturalium Quaestionum, Liber VII, 25.
[3] T. Lucretius Carus: De Rerum Natura, Lib. V, 1455—"Paullatim docuit
pedetentim progredienteis."
[4] Marcus Aurelius Antoninus: Meditations, IX, 28; VI, 37; XI, 1.
[5] Andrew D. White: A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in
Christendom, Vol. I, p. 97.
[6] Roger Bacon: Epistola de Secretis Operibus Artis et Naturae, et de
Nullitate Magiae, Caput IV, in Opera Quaedam Hactenus Inedita, edited by
J. S. Brewer, p. 533.
[7] Jerome Cardan: De Subtilitate, Liber Decimusseptimus: De artibus,
artificiosisque rebus.
[8] Edward Winslow: Hypocrisie Unmasked, p. 97.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Blaise Pascal: Opuscules, Preface to the Treatise on Vacuum, in The
Thoughts, Letters and Opuscules of Blaise Pascal, Translated by O. W.
Wight, p. 550.
[11] Alfred Tennyson: Locksley Hall Sixty Years After.
[12] Comte de Saporta: Le Monde des Plantes avant L'Apparition de
L'Homme, p. 109.
[13] H. Faye: Sur L'Origine du Monde, Chapitre XI, p. 256-7.
[14] Joseph McCabe: The End of the World, p. 112.
[15] Eduard von Hartmann: Ausgewählte Werke, viii, pp. 572-3 (Leipzig,
1904).
[16] Joseph McCabe: The End of the World, pp. 116-117.
[17] Herbert Spencer: Illustrations of Universal Progress, Chapter I,
Progress: Its Law and Cause, p. 58; Social Statics, Part I, Chapter II,
The Evanescence of Evil, Sec. 4, p. 78 ff.
[18] Louis Bertrand: Saint Augustin, p. 342.