nate love and an overpowering
desire for personal moral improvement. This is so clear in the greatest
figures of the Middle Ages, men such as St. Bernard and St. Francis, and
it is so unlike anything that we know in the world before, that we are
justified in treating it as characteristic of the age. To some of us,
indeed, it will appear as the most important element in the general
notion of progress which we are tracing. It so appeared to Comte.[2] Of
numberless passages that might be quoted from fathers and doctors of the
Church, a few words from Nicholas of Cusa must suffice. He was a divine
of the early fifteenth century, true to the faith, but anxious to
improve the discipline of the Church. To him progress took an entirely
spiritual form. 'To be able to understand more and more without end is
the type of eternal wisdom.... Let a man desire to understand better
what he does understand and to love more what he does love and the whole
world will not satisfy him.'

Here is a point of view so different from the last that we find some
difficulty in fitting it into the same scheme of things. Yet both are
essential elements in Western civilization; both have been developed by
the operations of similar forces in the world civilized and incorporated
by Greece and Rome.

The Catholic divine looks entirely inward for his idea of progress, and
his conception contains elements of real and permanent validity, of
which our present notions are full. His eyes are turned towards the
future and there is no limit to his vision. And though the progress
contemplated is within the soul of the individual believer, it rests on
the two fundamental principles of knowledge and love which are both
essentially social. The believer may isolate himself from the world to
develop his higher nature, but the knowledge and the love which he
carries with him into his solitude are themselves fruits of that
intercourse with his fellows from which an exclusive religious ideal
temporarily cuts him off.

Nor must we forget that Catholic doctrine and discipline, though aiming
at this perfection of the individual rather than of the race, was
embodied in an organization which carried farther than the Roman Empire
the idea of a united civilization and furnished to many thinkers,
Bossuet as well as Dante, a first sketch of the progress of mankind.

But it is clear that this construction was provisional only, either on
the side of personal belief and practice,