nd human into mutually exclusive states has disappeared.

This would seem, then, to wipe out also any knowledge of absolute
values. Christian theism has interpreted God largely in static, final
terms. The craving for the absolute in the human mind, as witnessed by
the long course of the history of thought, as pathetically witnessed
to in the mixture of chicanery, fanaticism and insight of the modern
mystical and occult healing sects, is central and immeasurable. But
God, found, if at all, in the terms of a present process, is not
static and absolute, but dynamic and relative; indefinite, incomplete,
not final. And man's immense difference from Him, that sense of
the immeasurable space between creator and created, is strangely
contracted. The gulf between holiness and guiltiness tends also to
disappear. For our life would appear to be plastic and indefinite,
a process rather than a state, not open then to conclusive moral
estimates; incomplete, not fallen; life an orderly process, hence not
perverse but defensible; without known breaks or infringements, hence
relatively normal and sufficiently intelligible.

A second factor was the rise of the humane sciences. In the seventh
and eighth decades of the last century men were absorbed in the
discovery of the nature and extent of the material universe. But
beginning about 1890, interest swerved again toward man as its
most revealing study and most significant inhabitant. Anthropology,
ethnology, sociology, physical and functional psychology, came to
the front. Especially the humane studies of political science and
industrial economics were magnified because of the new and urgent
problems born of an industrial civilization and a capitalistic state.
The invention and perfection of the industrial machine had by now
thoroughly dislocated former social groupings, made its own ethical
standards and human problems. In the early days of the labor movement
William Morris wrote, "we have become slaves of the monster to which
invention has given birth." In 1853, shortly after the introduction of
the cotton gin into India, the Viceroy wrote: "The misery is scarcely
paralleled in the history of trade." (A large statement that!) "The
bones of the cotton workers whiten the plains of India."

But the temporary suffering caused by the immediate crowding out
of cottage industry and the abrupt increase in production was
insignificant beside the deeper influence, physical, moral, mental,
of t