s the spring and fountain of their confidence.
Cardan, in the sixteenth century, marveling at the then modern inventions
of the compass, the printing press, and gunpowder, cried, "All antiquity
has nothing comparable to these three things." [7] Every year from that
day to this has deepened the impression made upon the minds of men by the
marvelous prospect of harnessing the resources of the universe. The last
one hundred and twenty-five years have seen the invention of the
locomotive, the steamship, the telegraph, the sewing machine, the camera,
the telephone, the gasoline engine, wireless telegraphy and telephony,
and the many other applications of electricity. As one by one new areas
of power have thus come under the control of man, with every conquest
suggesting many more not yet achieved but brought within range of
possibility, old theories of cosmic degeneration and circular futility
have gone to pieces, the glamour of antiquity has lost its allurement,
the great days of humanity upon the earth have been projected into the
future, and the gradual achievement of human progress has become the hope
of man.

Another element in the emergence of the modern progressive outlook upon
life is immediately consequent upon the first: world-wide discovery,
exploration and intercommunication. Great as the practical results have
been which trace their source to the adventurers who, from Columbus down,
pioneered unknown seas to unknown lands, the psychological effects have
been greater still. Who could longer live cooped up in a static world,
when the old barriers were so being overpassed and new continents were
inviting adventure, settlement, and social experiment hitherto untried?
The theological progressiveness of the Pilgrim Fathers, starting out from
Leyden for a new world, was not primarily a matter of speculation; it was
even more a matter of an adventurous spirit, which, once admitted into
life, could not be kept out of religious thought as well. In Edward
Winslow's account of Pastor Robinson's last sermon before the little
company of pioneers left Leyden, we read that Robinson "took occasion
also miserably to bewaile the state and condition of the Reformed
Churches, who were come to a period in Religion, and would goe no further
than the instruments of their Reformation: As for example, the
_Lutherans_ they could not be drawne to goe beyond what _Luther_ saw, for
whatever part of God's will he had further imparted and