eceding it. There are some people who maintain that while the
material advance is unquestionable, the intellectual advance is on the
whole more doubtful, and that, morally speaking, human nature is no
different from what it ever was. But I do not think any serious
historian would say this. Intellectually, the average man may still be
inferior to Plato,--though even Plato did not understand the need for
exact thought as modern philosophers do,--but civilisation as a whole
has produced a higher level of intellectual attainment than had been
reached by Plato's world. A civilisation in which four-fifths of the
people were helots kept in ignorance in order that an aristocratic few
might enjoy the benefits of culture was not equal to ours, great and
glaring as the defects of ours may be. Again, while it is only too
sadly true that modern civilisation contains plenty of callous
selfishness, gross injustice, and abominable cruelty, it can hardly be
denied that these relics of our brute ancestry are universally
deplored, and that society recognises them to be inimical to its
well-being and seeks to get rid of them. Thank God, as Anthony
Trollope said, that bad as men are to-day they are not as men were in
the days of the Caesars.

If the New Theology controversy had arisen a few hundred years ago,
theological disputants would not have wasted time in writing newspaper
articles; they would have met in solemn conclave and condemned the
heretic to be flayed alive or hung over a slow fire or treated in some
similarly convincing manner. Of course it is remotely possible that
some of them would like to do it now, but public opinion would not let
them; things have changed, and the change is in the direction of a
higher general morality. If any man feels pessimistic about the
present, let him study the past and he will feel reassured. Those who
maintain that society is not morally better but only more sentimental,
beg the question. What they call sentimentalism is greater
sensibility, greater sympathy, a keener sense of justice. What is the
moral ideal but love? Every advance in the direction of universal love
and brotherhood is a moral advance. The sternness of Stoicism or
Puritanism was an imperfect morality. The grandeur and impressiveness
of it were due to the fact that Stoics and Puritans for the most part
took their ideal seriously; they aimed at something high and dedicated
their lives to it. This dedication of the