or of ecclesiastical
organization; provisional, that is, if we are looking for real unity in
the mind of mankind. For we need a doctrine, a scheme of knowledge, into
which all that we discover about the world and our own nature may find
its place; we need principles of action which will guide us in attaining
a state of society more congruent with our knowledge of the
possibilities of the world and human nature, more thoroughly inspired
by human love, love of man for man as a being living his span of life
here and now, under conditions which call for a concentration of skill
and effort to realize the best. The breaking of the old Catholic
synthesis, narrow but admirable within its limits, took place at what we
call the Renascence and Reformation; the linking up of a new one is the
task of our own and many later generations. Let it not be thought that
such a change involves the destruction of any vital element in the idea
of progress already achieved; if true and vital, every element must
survive. But it does involve an acceptance of the fact that progress, or
humanity, or the evolution of the divine within us--however we prefer to
phrase it--is a larger thing than any one organization or any one set of
carefully harmonized doctrines. The truth, and the organ in which we
enshrine it, must grow with the human minds who are collectively
producing it. The new unity is itself progress.

It must give us confidence in facing such a prospect to observe that at
each remove from the first appearance of the idea of progress in the
world man's use of the word has carried more meaning and, though
sometimes quieter in tone, as in recent times, is better grounded in the
facts of life and history. Such an advance in our conceptions took place
after the Renascence. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, when
the art and science of the ancient world had been recovered, the word
and the idea of progress started on a fresh course of unexampled vigour.
The lines were closer to those of the pre-Christian than of the Catholic
world, but it would be by no means true to call them pagan. When Bacon
and Descartes begin to sound the modern note of progress, they think
primarily of an advance in the arts and sciences, but there is a
spiritual and human side to their ideal which could not be really
paralleled in classical thought. The Spirit of Man is now invoked, and
this, not in the sense of an elite, the builders of the Greek State or
the r