tronger,
more constant, more progressive. But the world of sin is still what it
was: and always there lies upon it the same stamp of the divine
condemnation. We look around on the life of our city, with its selfish
and disgusting lusts, with its drunkenness, with its enervating luxury,
with its selfish wealth, with its reckless and immoral gambling, with
its dishonest commerce, with its grasping avarice so neglectful of the
lives of those whom it makes its instruments: we look round, I say, not
on the whole life, but on the sinful life of our city, and we see what
human nature is plainly meant not to be, either in its characteristics
or in its miserable issues. And by the interval between what we see
life to be and what we know it was meant to be, we can measure the
reality of the divine judgement. The facts press upon us the truth
which St. Paul would teach. The sinful life is a condemned life. Here
is an {78} actual disclosure of the wrath of God upon all
unrighteousness and sin.

2. But what will 'science' say to St. Paul's account of human
degeneracy and degradation? Does not St. Paul seem to talk, as
moralists in general have been disposed to talk, as if the course of
the world's history had been a downward course? and is not this the
religious view? and is it not directly opposed to the scientific view
of a gradual process of development and advance? This is a very common
form of question to suggest itself to our minds. And the answer to it
appears to be this[14]:--The biblical view of the world is not by any
means that as a whole it has gone from bad to worse. It recognizes
periods and areas of degradation, and suggests periods and areas of
stagnation. And this is what anthropology and history equally suggest.
But its main concern is with the history of one particular line of
human advancement under divine guidance through Abraham and Moses and
prophets and kings, through Christ and His Church: an advancement which
is to be finally world-wide, and even more than world-wide, in its
effects. Other lines of progress in civilization and knowledge {79}
the Bible recognizes but is not largely concerned with. But it is in
its general effect thoroughly in accord with science, which suggests
not general and equable advance over the whole region of humanity, but
advance in special departments along the line of select races,
continually impeded in its progress by counter tendencies, by periods
and areas of de