ndless permutations. How then in such a world can religion mean to us
what it has meant to the saints who of old, amid a shaken world, have
sung:

"Change and decay in all around I see;
O Thou, Who changest not, abide with me!"

This fear of the unsettling effects of the idea of progress accounts
for most of the resentment against it in the realm of theology, and for
the desperate endeavours which perennially are made to congeal the
Christian movement at some one stage and to call that stage final.
Stability, however, can never be achieved by resort to such reactionary
dogmatism. What one obtains by that method is not stability but
stagnation, and the two, though often confused, are utterly different.
Stagnation is like a pool, stationary, finished, and without
progressive prospects. A river, however, has another kind of
steadfastness altogether. It is not stationary; it flows; it is never
twice the same and its enlarging prospects as it widens and deepens in
its course are its glory. Nevertheless, the Hudson and the Mississippi
and the Amazon are among the most stable and abiding features which
nature knows. They will probably outlast many mountains. They will
certainly outlast any pool.

The spiritual stability which we may have in a progressive world is of
this latter sort, if we believe in the living God. It is so much more
inspiring than the stagnation of the dogmatist that one wonders how any
one, seeing both, could choose the inferior article in which to repose
his trust. Consider, for example, the development of the idea of God
himself, the course of which through the Bible we briefly traced in a
previous lecture. From Sinai to Calvary--was ever a record of
progressive revelation more plain or more convincing? The development
begins with Jehovah disclosed in a thunder-storm on a desert mountain,
and it ends with Christ saying: "God is a Spirit: and they that worship
him must worship in spirit and truth;" it begins with a war-god leading
his partisans to victory and it ends with men saying, "God is love; and
he that abideth in love abideth in God, and God abideth in him;" it
begins with a provincial deity loving his tribe and hating its enemies
and it ends with the God of the whole earth worshiped by "a great
multitude, which no man could number, out of every nation and of all
tribes and peoples and tongues;" it begins with a God who commands the
slaying of the Amalekites, "both man and woman,