hat catastrophe, and assure
ourselves that the bugbear of their recurrence is nothing more than a
bugbear. The printing-press alone is an inestimable safeguard. If the
Greeks had hit upon the idea of movable types--and it is little to the
credit of the Invisible King that they did not--the onrush of
barbarism and Byzantinism would not have been half so disastrous. And
even through the Dark Ages the bias towards betterment is still
perceptible, though its operation was terribly hampered. Then, at
last, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries took up the thread of
progress where antiquity had dropped it. Science revived, and bade
defiance to dogma. The garnering of knowledge began afresh; and true
knowledge has this to distinguish it from pseudo-sciences like
astrology, theology, and philately, that it is instinct with
procreative vigour. Knowledge breeds knowledge with ever-increasing
rapidity; and the result is that the past hundred years have seen
additions to man's control over the powers of nature which outstrip
the wildest imaginings of Eastern romance. When Mr. Gladstone first
went to Rome in 1832, his "transportation" was no swifter and scarcely
more comfortable than that of Caesar in the fifties before Christ.
Today he could fly over the Matterhorn and Monte Rosa, and then cover
the distance from Milan onwards at the rate of seventy miles an hour
in a limousine as luxurious as an Empress's boudoir. We are piling up
the knowledge which is power at an enormous rate--indeed rather too
rapidly, since we have not yet the sense to discriminate between power
for good and power for evil. But "burnt bairns dread the fire," and
after the present awful experience, there is fair ground for hope that
measures will be taken to provide strait-waistcoats for the criminal
lunatics whose vanity and greed impel them to let loose the powers of
destruction.

Can any thinking man say that the world is quite the same to him since
the invention of wireless telegraphy? True it is only one among the
multitude of phenomena behind which the Veiled Being dissembles
himself. But is it not a phenomenon of a new and perhaps an
epoch-marking order? It may not make the veil more diaphanous, but it
somehow suggests an alteration--perhaps a progressive alteration--in
its texture.

When we say we are sure of the fact of progress, the atheist comes
down on us with the retort that we thereby confess ourselves naive and
credulous optimists. As well