was drawn out
into its filaments and then woven into a fabric of new form but of the
same old material. Knowledge did not start from actual things; it did
not intend to change actual things; and the shelves of the libraries
groan with the burden of that endless and largely futile cogitation.
Then the new knowledge began from the observation of things as they
really are and from the use of that observation for the purposes of human
life. Once a lad, seventeen years old, went into the cathedral at Pisa
to worship. Soon he forgot the service and watched a chandelier,
swinging from the lofty roof. He wondered whether, no matter how
changeable the length of its arc, its oscillations always consumed the
same time and, because he had no other means, he timed its motion by the
beating of his pulse. That was one time when a boy went to church and
did well to forget the service. He soon began to wonder whether he could
not make a pendulum which, swinging like the chandeliers, would do useful
business for men. He soon began to discover, in what he had seen that
day, new light on the laws of planetary motion. That was one of the
turning points in human history--the boy was Galileo. The consequences
of this new method are all around us now. The test of knowledge in
modern life is capacity to cause change. If a man really knows
electricity he can cause change; he can illumine cities and drive cars.
If a man really knows engineering, he can cause change; he can tunnel
rivers and bridge gulfs. It is for that purpose we wish knowledge.
Instead of being dreaded, controlled change has become the chief desire
of modern life.

When, therefore, in this generation with its perception of growth as the
universal law and with its dependence upon controlled change as the hope
of man, Christianity endeavours to glorify changelessness and to maintain
itself in unalterable formulations, it has outlawed itself from its own
age. An Indian punkah-puller, urged by his mistress to better his
condition, replied: "Mem Sahib, my father pulled a punkah, my grandfather
pulled a punkah, all my ancestors for four million ages pulled punkahs,
and, before that, the god who founded our caste pulled a punkah over
Vishnu." How utterly lost such a man would be in the dynamic movements
of our modern Western life!--yet not more lost than is a Christianity
which tries to remain static in a progressive world.

III

Among the influences which have force