oscillated between natural and artificial sanitation (the oldest house
in the world, unearthed the other day in Crete, has quite modern
sanitary arrangements), and rung a thousand changes on the different
scales of income and pressure of population, firmly believing all the
time that mankind was advancing by leaps and bounds because men were
constantly busy. And the mere chapter of accidents has left a small
accumulation of chance discoveries, such as the wheel, the arch, the
safety pin, gunpowder, the magnet, the Voltaic pile and so forth: things
which, unlike the gospels and philosophic treatises of the sages, can be
usefully understood and applied by common men; so that steam locomotion
is possible without a nation of Stephensons, although national
Christianity is impossible without a nation of Christs. But does any
man seriously believe that the chauffeur who drives a motor car from
Paris to Berlin is a more highly evolved man than the charioteer of
Achilles, or that a modern Prime Minister is a more enlightened ruler
than Caesar because he rides a tricycle, writes his dispatches by the
electric light, and instructs his stockbroker through the telephone?

Enough, then, of this goose-cackle about Progress: Man, as he is, never
will nor can add a cubit to his stature by any of its quackeries,
political, scientific, educational, religious, or artistic. What is
likely to happen when this conviction gets into the minds of the men
whose present faith in these illusions is the cement of our social
system, can be imagined only by those who know how suddenly a
civilization which has long ceased to think (or in the old phrase, to
watch and pray) can fall to pieces when the vulgar belief in its
hypocrisies and impostures can no longer hold out against its failures
and scandals. When religious and ethical formulae become so obsolete
that no man of strong mind can believe them, they have also reached the
point at which no man of high character will profess them; and from,
that moment until they are formally disestablished, they stand at the
door of every profession and every public office to keep out every able
man who is not a sophist or a liar. A nation which revises its parish
councils once in three years, but will not revise its articles of
religion once in three hundred, even when those articles avowedly began
as a political compromise dictated by Mr Facing-Both-Ways, is a nation
that needs remaking.

Our only hope, t