ake their place as an
ultimate for hope. Whatever else may be true, progress on a transient
planet has not done away with the need of God and life eternal.

Moreover, not only have our twentieth century thought and experience
seriously qualified the meaning of progress on this earth by the limiting
of the earth's duration; men have come also to distrust, as a quite
unjustified flourish of sentimentality, the mid-Victorian confidence in
an automatic evolution which willy-nilly lifts humanity to higher levels.
Said Herbert Spencer, "Progress is not an accident, not a thing within
human control, but a beneficent necessity." "This advancement is due to
the working of a universal law; . . . in virtue of that law it must
continue until the state we call perfection is reached. . . . Thus the
ultimate development of the ideal man is logically certain--as certain as
any conclusion in which we place the most implicit faith; . . . so surely
must the things we call evil and immorality disappear; so surely must man
become perfect." [17] There is no scientific basis whatever for such a
judgment. Evolution is not an escalator which, whether or not man run in
addition to its lift, will inevitably raise humanity to a heaven on
earth. Potatoes in the cellar shooting out long white eyes in search of
light are evolving, but they are evolving worse. Upon the basis of a
scientific doctrine of evolution, no idolatrous superstition could be
much more lacking in intellectual support than Spencer's confidence in a
universal, mechanical, irresistible movement toward perfection. The
plain fact is that human history is a strange blend of progress and
regress; it is the story of the rhythmic rise and fall of civilizations
and empires, of gains made only to be lost and lost only to be fought for
once again. Even when advance has come, it has come by mingled progress
and cataclysm as water passes, through gradual increase of warmth, from
ice suddenly to liquid and from liquid suddenly to vapour. Our
nineteenth century ideas of evolution tended to create in us the
impression that humanity had made a smooth and even ascent. We
artificially graded the ascending track of human history, leveled and
macadamized it, and talked of inevitable progress. Such sentimental
optimism has ceased even to be comforting, so utterly untenable has it
become to every well-instructed mind.

To such unfounded faith in automatic progress a valuable counterweight i