r generation what the Greek philosophers of the
Fifth Century B.C. did for theirs--they made the thought of God moral:
"God is never in any way unrighteous--He is perfect righteousness; and
he of us who is the most righteous is most like Him" (Plato, _Theaet_.
176c).

From this movement of thought our chief gains have been:

(1) A view of God as good as the best of men; and that means a God as
good as Jesus of Nazareth. Older theologians talked much of God's
decrees; we speak oftener of His character.

(2) The emphasis upon the humanity of Jesus and of our ability and duty
to become like Him. Spurred by Romanticism's interest in imaginatively
reconstructing history, many _Lives of Christ_ have been written; and it
is no exaggeration to say that Jesus is far better known and understood
at present than He has been since the days of the evangelists.

A third quarry is the _Physical Sciences_. As its blocks were taken out
most Christians were convinced that they could never be employed for the
temple of faith. They seemed fitted to express the creed of materialism,
not of the Spirit. Science was interested in finding the beginnings of
things; its greatest book during the century bore the title, _The Origin
of Species_; and the lowly forms in which religion and human life itself
appeared at their start seemed to degrade them. Law was found dominant
everywhere; and this was felt to do away with the possibility of prayer
and miracle, even of a personal God. Its investigations into nature
exposed a world of plunder and prey, where, as Mill put it, all the
things for which men are hanged or imprisoned are everyday performances.
The scientific view of the world differed totally from that which was in
the minds of devout people, and with that which was in the minds of the
writers of the Bible. A large part of the last century witnessed a
constant warfare between theologians and naturalists, with many
attempted reconciliations. Today thinking people see that the battle was
due to mistakes on both sides; that there is a scientific and a
religious approach to Truth; and that strife ensues only when either
attempts to block the other's path. Charles Darwin wisely said, "I do
not attack Moses, and I think Moses can take care of himself." Both
physicists and theologians were wrong when they thought of "nature" as
something fixed, so that it is possible to state what is natural and
what supernatural; "nature" is plastic, responding al