s
acquaintance with the life of a man like St. Augustine. As one reads
Augustine's sermons one can hear in the background the collapse of a
great civilization. One can tell from his discourses when the barbarians
began to move on Rome. One can hear the crash when Alaric and his hordes
sacked the Eternal City. One can catch the accent of horror at the tidal
waves of anarchy that everywhere swept in to engulf the falling empire.
"Horrible things," said Augustine, "have been told us. There have been
ruins, and fires, and rapine, and murder, and torture. That is true; we
have heard it many times; we have shuddered at all this disaster; we have
often wept, and we have hardly been able to console ourselves." [18] At
last, the empire in ruins, the old civilization tottering to its
collapse, Augustine died in his episcopal city of Hippo, while the
barbarians were hammering at the city gates. Through such scenes this
generation too has lived and has had to learn again, what we never should
have forgotten, that human history is not a smooth and well-rolled lawn
of soft ascents; that it is mountainous, precipitous, terrific--a country
where all progress must be won by dint of intelligence and toil, and
where it is as easy to lose the gains of civilization as it is to fall
over a cliff or to surrender a wheat field to the weeds. An archeologist
in Mesopotamia talked with an Arab lad who neither read, himself, nor
knew any one who did; yet the lad, when he acknowledged this, stood
within a stone's throw of the site where milleniums ago was one of the
greatest universities of the ancient world and where still, amid the
desolation, one could dig and find the old clay tablets on which the
children of that ancient time had learned to write. Progress? Regress!
While history as a whole, from the Cro-Magnon man to the twentieth
century, does certainly suggest a great ascent, it has not been an
automatic levitation. It has been a fight, tragic and ceaseless, against
destructive forces. This world needs something more than a soft gospel
of inevitable progress. It needs salvation from its ignorance, its sin,
its inefficiency, its apathy, its silly optimisms and its appalling
carelessness.

V

Nevertheless, though it is true that our modern ideas of progress on this
earth never in themselves can supply an adequate philosophy of life, and
though it is true that they do not dispense with, but rather emphasize,
our need of God a