thinker who went before.
Free-thought may be suggestive, it may be inspiriting, it may have as
much as you please of the merits that come from vivacity and
variety. But there is one thing Free-thought can never be by any
possibility--Free-thought can never be progressive. It can never be
progressive because it will accept nothing from the past; it begins
every time again from the beginning; and it goes every time in a
different direction. All the rational philosophers have gone along
different roads, so it is impossible to say which has gone farthest. Who
can discuss whether Emerson was a better optimist than Schopenhauer was
pessimist? It is like asking if this corn is as yellow as that hill is
steep. No; there are only two things that really progress; and they both
accept accumulations of authority. They may be progressing uphill and
down; they may be growing steadily better or steadily worse; but they
have steadily increased in certain definable matters; they have steadily
advanced in a certain definable direction; they are the only two things,
it seems, that ever _can_ progress. The first is strictly physical
science. The second is the Catholic Church."

"Physical science and the Catholic Church!" said Turnbull sarcastically;
"and no doubt the first owes a great deal to the second."

"If you pressed that point I might reply that it was very probable,"
answered MacIan calmly. "I often fancy that your historical
generalizations rest frequently on random instances; I should not be
surprised if your vague notions of the Church as the persecutor of
science was a generalization from Galileo. I should not be at all
surprised if, when you counted the scientific investigations and
discoveries since the fall of Rome, you found that a great mass of them
had been made by monks. But the matter is irrelevant to my meaning. I
say that if you want an example of anything which has progressed in
the moral world by the same method as science in the material world, by
continually adding to without unsettling what was there before, then I
say that there _is_ only one example of it. And that is Us."

"With this enormous difference," said Turnbull, "that however elaborate
be the calculations of physical science, their net result can be tested.
Granted that it took millions of books I never read and millions of men
I never heard of to discover the electric light. Still I can see the
electric light. But I cannot see the supreme virtue whi