nd material advances which can be accumulated and added
up." [6]

Let any Christian preacher test out this matter and discover for
himself its truth. We are preachers of the Gospel in the twentieth
century. St. Francis of Assisi was a preacher of the Gospel in the
thirteenth century. We know many things which St. Francis and his
generation never could have known but, when we step back through that
outward change into the spirit of St. Francis himself, we must take the
shoes from off our feet, for the place whereon we stand is holy ground.
We may not talk in such an hour about progress in Christian character
in terms of chronology, for a modern minister might well pray to touch
the garment's hem of such a spirit as St. Francis had! When, then, one
speaks of outgrowing Jesus, one would do well to get a better reason
than simply the fact that he was born nineteen centuries ago. The
truth is that humanity has been upon this planet hundreds of thousands
of years, while our known history reaches back, and that very dimly,
through only some four or five thousand. In that known time there has
certainly been no biological development in man that any scientist has
yet discerned. Even the brain of man in the ice age was apparently as
large as ours. Moreover, within that period of history well known to
us, we can see many ups and downs of spiritual life, mountain peaks of
achievement in literature and art and religion, with deep valleys
intervening, but we cannot be sure that the mountain peaks now are
higher than they used to be. The art of the two centuries culminating
about 1530 represents a glorious flowering of creative genius, but it
was succeeded by over three centuries of descent to the abominations of
ugliness which the late eighteenth century produced. We have climbed
up a little since then, but not within distant reach of those lovers
and makers of beauty from whose hearts and hands the Gothic cathedrals
came. Progress in history has lain in the power of man to remember and
so to accumulate for general use the discoveries, both material and
ethical, of many individuals; it has lain in man's increasing
information about the universe, in his increasing mastery over external
nature, and in the growing integration of his social life; it has not
lain in the production of creative personalities appearing in the
course of history with ever greater sublimity of spirit and grasp of
intellect. Where is there a mind o