nternational situation than a multitude of people who will sit
in radical judgment on the actions of their governments, so that when
the governments of the world begin to talk war they will know that
surely they must face a mass of people rising up to say: War? Why war?
We are no longer dumb beasts to be led to the slaughter; we no longer
think that any state on earth is God Almighty. If, however, we are to
have that attitude strong enough so that it will stand the strain of
mob psychology and the fear of consequences, it must be founded deep,
as was Jesus' attitude: one absolute loyalty to the will of God for all
mankind. So far from hurting true patriotism, this attitude would be
the making of patriotism. It would purge patriotism from all its
peril, would exalt it, purify it, make of it a blessing, not a curse.
But whatever be the effect upon patriotism, the Christian is committed
by the Master to a prior loyalty; he is a citizen of the Kingdom of God
in all the earth.

An easy-going belief in inherent and inevitable progress, therefore, is
positively perilous in the manifoldly complex social situation, from
which only the most careful thinking and the most courageous living
will ever rescue us. The Christian Church is indeed entrusted, in the
message of Jesus, with the basic principles of life which the world
needs, but the clarity of vision which sees their meaning and the
courage of heart which will apply them are not easy to achieve. Some
of us have felt that acutely these last few years; all of us should
have learned that whatever progress is wrought out upon this planet
will be sternly fought for and hardly won. Belief in the idea of
progress does not mean that this earth is predestined to drift into
Paradise like thistledown before an inevitable wind.

III

A third peril associated with the idea of progress is quite as
widespread as the other two and in some ways more insidious. The idea
is prevalent that progress involves the constant supersession of the
old by the new so that we, who have appeared thus late in human history
and are therefore the heirs "of all the ages, in the foremost files of
time," may at once assume our superiority to the ancients. The modern
man, living in a world supposedly progressing from early crude
conditions toward perfection, has shifted the golden age from the past
to the future, and in so doing has placed himself in much closer
proximity to it than his ancestors we