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.
V
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.