but going deeper
into it.

Here, then, are the three perils which tempt the believer in progress:
a silly underestimate of the tremendous force of human sin, which
withstands all real advance; superficial reliance upon social
palliatives to speed the convalescence of the world, when only radical
cures will do; flippant irreverence toward the past, when, as a matter
of fact, the light we have for the future shines upon us from behind.
He who most believes in progress needs most to resist its temptations.

[1] James H. Snowden: Is the World Growing Better? pp. 41-42.

[2] Francis Turner Palgrave: Faith and Light in the Latter Days.

[3] George Hakewill: An Apologie of the Power and Providence of God in
the Government of the World, or An Examination and Censure of the
Common Errour Touching Natures Perpetuall and Universall Decay.

[4] W. E. H. Lecky: History of European Morals from Augustus to
Charlemagne, Vol. II, p. 9.

[5] C. G. Montefiore: Some Elements of the Religious Teaching of Jesus
According to the Synoptic Gospels, p. 133.

[6] Gilbert Murray: Tradition and Progress, Chapter I, Religio
Grammatici, IV, pp. 19-20.

LECTURE VI

PROGRESS AND GOD

I

We may well begin our final lecture, on the interplay between the idea
of progress and the idea of God, by noting that only faith in God can
satisfy man's craving for spiritual stability amid change. The central
element in the conception of a progressive world is that men's thoughts
and lives have changed, are changing and will change, that nothing
therefore is settled in the sense of being finally formulated, that
creation has never said its last word on any subject or landed its last
hammer blow on any task. Such an outlook on life, instead of being
exhilarating, is to many disquieting in the extreme. In particular it
is disquieting in religion, one of whose functions has always been to
provide stability, to teach men amid the transient to see the eternal.
If in a changing world religious thought changes too, if in that realm
also new answers are given to old questions and new questions rise that
never have been answered before, if forms of faith in which men once
trusted are outgrown, man's unsettlement seems to be complete. The
whole world then is like a huge kaleidoscope turning round and round
and, as it turns, the manifold elements in human experience, even its
religious doctrines and practices, arrange and rearrange themselves in
e