were they to be relied upon. The story of man's telling of the time of
day is a story of progressive change, but it does not lack stability.
The sun and stars and the revolution of the earth abide. The changes
in man's telling of the time have been simply the unfolding of an
abiding relationship between man and his world.

So the development of man's religious ideas from early, crude
beginnings until now is not a process which one would wish to stop at
any point in order to achieve infallible security. The movement is not
haphazard and discontinuous change, like disparate particles in a
kaleidoscope falling together in new but vitally unrelated ways. Upon
the contrary, its course is a continuous path which can be traced,
recovered in thought, conceived as a whole. We can see where our ideas
came from, what now they are, and in what direction they probably will
move. The stability is in the process itself, arising out of the
abiding relationships of man with the eternal.

Indeed, the endeavour to achieve stability by methods which alone can
bring stagnation, the endeavor, that is, to hit upon dogmatic finality
in opinion, is of all things in religion probably the most disastrous
in its consequence. Until recent times when reform movements invaded
Mohammedanism and higher criticism tackled the problem of the Koran,
one could see this achievement of stagnation in Islam in all its
inglorious success. The Koran was regarded as having been infallibly
written, word for word, in heaven before ever it came to earth. The
Koran therefore was a book of inerrant and changeless opinion. But the
Koran enshrines the best theological and ethical ideas of Arabia at the
time when it was written: God was an oriental monarch, ruling in
heaven; utter submission to the fate which he decreed was the one law
of human relationship with him; and on earth slavery and polygamy and
conversion of unbelievers by force were recognized as right. The Koran
was ahead of its day, but having been by a theory of inspiration
petrified into artificial finality it became the enemy of all opinions
which would pass beyond its own.

When, now, one contrasts Mohammedanism with Christianity, one finds an
important difference. For all our temptation, succumbed to by
multitudes, to make the Bible a Koran, Christianity has had a
progressive revelation. In the Bible one can find all the ideas and
customs which Mohammedanism has approved and for which it