re. The world is getting
better--such is the common assumption which is naturally associated
with the idea of progress. As one enthusiastic sponsor of this
proposition puts it:

"Go back ten years, and there was no airship; fifteen years, and there
was no wireless telegraphy; twenty-five years, and there was no
automobile; forty years, and there was no telephone, and no electric
light; sixty years, and there was no photograph, and no sewing machine;
seventy-five years, no telegraph; one hundred years, no railway and no
steamship; one hundred and twenty-five years, no steam engine; two
hundred years, no post-office; three hundred years, no newspaper; five
hundred years, no printing press; one thousand years, no compass, and
ships could not go out of sight of land; two thousand years, no writing
paper, but parchments of skin and tablets of wax and clay. Go back far
enough and there were no plows, no tools, no iron, no cloth; people ate
acorns and roots and lived in caves and went naked or clothed
themselves in the skins of wild beasts." [1]

Such is the picture of human history upon this planet which occupies
the modern mind, and one implication often drawn is that we have
outgrown the ancients and that they might well learn from us and not we
from them.

Christians, however, center their allegiance around ideas and
personalities which are, from the modern standpoint, very old indeed.
The truths that were wrought out in the developing life and faith of
the Hebrew-Christian people are still the regulative Christian truths,
and the personality who crowned the whole development is still the
Christians' Lord. They are challenged, however, to maintain this in a
progressive world. Men do not think of harking back to ancient
Palestine nineteen centuries ago for their business methods, their
educational systems, their scientific opinions, or anything else in
ordinary life whatever. Then why go back to ancient Palestine for the
chief exemplar of the spiritual life? This is a familiar modern
question which springs directly from popular interpretations of
progress.

"Dim tracts of time divide
Those golden days from me;
Thy voice comes strange o'er years of change;
How can I follow Thee?

"Comes faint and far Thy voice
From vales of Galilee;
Thy vision fades in ancient shades;
How should we follow Thee?" [2]

Behind this familiar mood lies one of the most significant changes that
has e