, on his return from the
disappointing quest, the pitiless cold, the endless blizzards, the
failing food, had worn down the strength of the little company and in
their tent amid the boundless desolation they waited for the end while
the life flames burned low, Captain Scott wrote: "I do not regret this
journey. . . . We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out
against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the
will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last." [1]
That is resignation at its noblest.

When, however, a modern Christian tries to do what the medieval
Christians did--make this attitude of resignation cover the whole field
of life, make it the dominant element in their religion, the proof of
their trust and the test of their piety--he finds himself separated from
the most characteristic and stirring elements in his generation. We are
not resigned anywhere else. Everywhere else we count it our pride and
glory to be unresigned. We are not resigned even to a thorny cactus,
whose spiky exterior seems a convincing argument against its use for
food. When we see a barren plain we do not say as our fathers did: God
made plains so in his inscrutable wisdom; his will be done! We call for
irrigation and, when the fructifying waters flow, we say, Thy will be
done! in the way we think God wishes to have it said. We do not
passively submit to God's will; we actively assert it. The scientific
control of life at this point has deeply changed our religious mood. We
are not resigned to pestilences and already have plans drawn up to make
the yellow fever germ "as extinct as the woolly rhinoceros." We are not
even resigned to the absence of wireless telephony when once we have
imagined its presence, or to the inconvenience of slow methods of travel
when once we have invented swift ones. Not to illiteracy nor to child
labour nor to the white plague nor to commercialized vice nor to
recurrent unemployment are we, at our best, resigned.

This change of mood did not come easily. So strongly did the medieval
spirit of resignation, submissive in a static world, keep its grip upon
the Church that the Church often defiantly withstood the growth of this
unresigned attitude of which we have been speaking and in which we glory.
Lightning rods were vehemently denounced by many ministers as an
unwarranted interference with God's use of lightning. When God hit a
house he meant t