nd immortality and the saving powers which Christians
find in Christ, yet those ideas have in them a permanent contribution to
the life of man from whose influence the race cannot escape. When we
have granted the limitations which disillusioned thoughtfulness suggests
concerning progress upon this earth, it still remains true that, in our
new scientific control over the latent resources of the earth without and
over our own mental and moral processes within, we have a machinery for
producing change that opens up exciting prospects before humanity. Never
in our outlook upon man's earthly future can we go back to the endless
cosmic cycles of the Greeks or the apocalyptic expectations of the
Hebrews. We are committed to the hope of making progress, and the
central problem which Christianity faces in adjusting her thought and
practice to the modern age is the problem of coming to intelligent terms
with this dominant idea.

These lectures are an excursion to spy out this land and to see, if we
may, what the idea of progress through the scientific control of life is
likely to mean and ought to mean to Christianity. If this modern idea is
not intelligently guided in its effect upon our faith and practice, it
will none the less have its effect in haphazard, accidental, unguided,
and probably ruinous ways. If one listens, for example, to the preaching
of liberal ministers, one sees that every accent of their teaching has
been affected by this prevalent and permeating thought. The God they
preach no longer sits afar like Dante's deity in the stationary empyrean
beyond all reach of change; their God is here in the midst of the human
struggle, "their Captain in the well-fought fight." H. G. Wells may be a
poor theologian but he is one of our best interpreters of popular thought
and his idea of God, marching through the world "like fifes and drums,"
calling the people to a progressive crusade for righteousness, is one
which modern folk find it most easy to accept. He is a God of progress
who undergirds our endeavours for justice in the earth with his power;
who fights in and for and with us against the hosts of evil; whose
presence is a guarantee of ultimate victory; and whose effect upon us is
to send us out to war against ancient human curses, assured that what
ought to be done can be done.

As men's thought of God has thus been molded by the idea of progress on
the earth, so, too, the Christ they preach is not primarily,