f good and {185} evil, he has fought with shadowy monsters and
wandered for years in the wilderness of helplessness and pessimism, he
has worshiped at the shrine of strange gods and prostrated himself
before the terrors of his own imagination. Slowly he has come to stand
erect and look about him and see the world and himself as they actually
are. Knowledge has become his most trusted instrument, and democratic
sympathy with human life his most cherished guide. With such a guide
and with such an instrument, he will before long set about to mold his
life in accordance with those mellower ideals which have grown in his
heart during his long pilgrimage. At last, man is becoming an adult
able to stand upon his feet and to look keenly around with a measuring
glance at things as they are. Will he not work for the sweet fruition
of those human values which are dear to his very soul--home, children,
kindly social intercourse, work which gives self-expression, art,
knowledge, contentment, all suffused with the vigor of healthy bodies
and the sleep of quiet nights? Man will surely come to desire greatly,
and achieve magnificently, and live courageously.

Now that the ethical degradation of the industrial revolution has been
stayed and society has turned its face from the clatter of
mass-production for its own sake, now that ethical reflection has been
united with reason and science in a sane realism, now that sympathy is
abroad in the land, now that democracy with its conception of human
brotherhood is astir throughout the world, ethics has secured a firm
foundation in the free aspirations of free men. If noble character and
rational conduct cannot maintain themselves in such a society, then the
theologian can rightly say that man is {186} by nature corrupt. But
the present is a time of growing loyalties to the common good and of
vigorous search for the efficient means to attain it in greater
measure. The great spiritual adventures of the future will surely be
human and humane.

{187}

CHAPTER XIV

THE CHURCH AS AN INSTITUTION--THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

Even a cursory glance at the institutional history of Christianity is
instructive. Beginning as an essentially democratic brotherhood of
fellow-believers in which wisdom and experience, rather than authority,
guided affairs, the Christian community gradually adopted the political
form of the society in which it found itself. The very names of the
church officials