ssive world,
and we have been studying the new Christian attitudes which this
influential environment has been eliciting. The Gospel has been in our
thought like an individual who, finding himself in novel circumstances,
reacts toward them in ways appropriate alike to them and to his own
character. The influence of the idea of progress upon Christianity,
however, is more penetrating than such a figure can adequately portray.
For no one can long ponder the significance of our generation's
progressive ways of thinking without running straight upon this question:
is not Christianity itself progressive? In the midst of a changing world
does not it also change, so that, reacting upon the new ideas of
progress, it not only assimilates and uses them, but is itself an
illustration of them? Where everything else in man's life in its origin
and growth is conceived, not in terms of static and final creation or
revelation, but in terms of development, can religion be left out?
Instead of being a pond around which once for all a man can walk and take
its measure, a final and completed whole, is not Christianity a river
which, maintaining still reliance upon the historic springs from which it
flows, gathers in new tributaries on its course and is itself a changing,
growing and progressive movement? The question is inevitable in any
study of the relationship between the Gospel and progress, and its
implications are so far-reaching that it deserves our careful thought.

Certainly it is clear that already modern ideas of progress have had so
penetrating an influence upon Christianity as to affect, not its external
reactions and methods only, nor yet its intellectual formulations alone,
but deeper still its very mood and inward temper. Whether or not
Christianity ought to be a changing movement in a changing world, it
certainly has been that and is so still, and the change can be seen going
on now in the very atmosphere in which it lives and moves and has its
being. For example, consider the attitude of resignation to the will of
God, which was characteristic of medieval Christianity. As we saw in our
first lecture, the medieval age did not think of human life upon this
earth in terms of progress. The hopes of men did not revolve about any
Utopia to be expected here. History was not even a glacier, moving
slowly toward the sunny meadows. It did not move at all; it was not
intended to move; it was standing still. To be sure, th