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.