y,
cruelty and selfishness do not impede the peaceful flowing of their
dreams. In a word, the idea of progress has blanketed the sense of
sin. Lord Morley spoke once of "that horrid burden and impediment upon
the soul which the Churches call Sin, and which, by whatever name you
call it, is a real catastrophe in the moral nature of man." The modern
age, busy with slick, swift schemes for progress, has too largely lost
sight of that.

Indeed, at no point do modern Christians differ more sharply from their
predecessors than in the serious facing of the problem of sin.
Christians of former times were burdened with a heavy sense of their
transgressions, and their primary interest in the Gospel was its
promised reestablishment of their guilty souls in the fellowship of a
holy God. Modern Christianity, however, is distinguished from all that
by a jaunty sense of moral well-being; when we admit our sins we do it
with complacency and cheerfulness; our religion is generally
characterized by an easy-going self-righteousness. Bunyan's Pilgrim
with his lamentable load upon his back, crying, "What shall I do! . . .
I am . . . undone by reason of a burden that lieth hard upon me," is no
fit symbol of a typically modern Christian.

Doubtless we have cause to be thankful for this swing away from the
morbid extremes to which our fathers often went in their sense of sin.
It is hard to forgive Jonathan Edwards when one reads in his famous
Enfield sermon: "The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as
one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors
you, and is dreadfully provoked; . . . you are ten thousand times so
abominable in his eyes, as the most hateful and venomous serpent is in
ours." Any one who understands human nature could have told him that,
after such a black exaggeration of human depravity as he and his
generation were guilty of, the Christian movement was foredoomed to
swing away over to the opposite extreme of complacent
self-righteousness. Unquestionably we have made the swing. In spite
of the debacle of the Great War, this is one of the most unrepentant
generations that ever walked the earth, dreaming still of automatic
progress toward an earthly paradise.

Many factors have gone into the making of this modern mood of
self-complacency. _New knowledge_ has helped, by which disasters, such
as once awakened our fathers' poignant sense of sin, are now attributed
to scientific causes rat