rigins of our spiritual
miseries in frustrated and suppressed desire. We do not need
artificially to conjure up a sense of sin. All we need to do is to
open our eyes to facts. Take one swift glance at the social state of
the world to-day. Consider our desperate endeavours to save this
rocking civilization from the consequences of the blow just delivered
it by men's iniquities. That should be sufficient to indicate that
this is no fool-proof universe automatically progressive, but that
moral evil is still the central problem of mankind.

One would almost say that the first rule for all who believe in a
progressive world is not to believe in it too much. Long ago Plato
said that he drove two horses, one white and tractable, the other black
and fractious; Jesus said that two masters sought man's allegiance, one
God, the other mammon; Paul said that his soul was the battle-ground of
two forces, one of which he called spirit and the other flesh; and only
the other day one of our own number told of the same struggle between
two men in each of us, one Dr. Jekyll, the other Mr. Hyde. That
conflict still is pivotal in human history. The idea of progress can
defeat itself no more surely than by getting itself so believed that
men expect automatic social advance apart from the conquest of personal
and social sin.

II

Another result of our superficial confidence in the idea of progress is
reliance upon social palliatives instead of radical cures for our
public maladies. We are so predisposed to think that the world
inherently wants to be better, is inwardly straining to be better, that
we are easily fooled into supposing that some slight easement of
external circumstance will at once release the progressive forces of
mankind and save the race. When, for example, one compares the immense
amount of optimistic expectancy about a warless world with the small
amount of radical thinking as to what really is the matter with us, he
may well be amazed at the unfounded regnancy of the idea of progress.
We rejoice over some slight disarmament as though that were the cure of
our international shame, whereas always one can better trust a real
Quaker with a gun than a thug without one. So the needs of our
international situation, involving external disarmament, to be sure,
involve also regenerations of thought and spirit much more radical than
any rearrangement of outward circumstance. To forget that is to lose
the possibility