ernity
of to-day. It has been the fashion to regard this changeableness with
wistful regret. So Wordsworth sings in his sonnet on Mutability:

"Truth fails not; but her outward forms that bear
The longest date do melt like frosty rime,
That in the morning whitened hill and plain
And is no more; drop like the tower sublime
Of yesterday, which royally did wear
Its crown of weeds, but could not even sustain
Some casual shout that broke the silent air,
Or the unimaginable touch of Time."

Such wistfulness, however, while a natural sentiment, is not true to the
best Christian thought of our day. He who believes in the living God,
while he will be far from calling all change progress, and while he will,
according to his judgment, withstand perverse changes with all his might,
will also regard the cessation of change as the greatest calamity that
could befall religion. Stagnation in thought or enterprise means death
for Christianity as certainly as it does for any other vital movement.
Stagnation, not change, is Christianity's most deadly enemy, for this is
a progressive world, and in a progressive world no doom is more certain
than that which awaits whatever is belated, obscurantist and reactionary.

[1] Leonard Huxley: Scott's Last Expedition, Vol. I, The Journals of
Captain R. F. Scott, Rn., C. V. O., p. 417.

[2] Kirby Page; The Sword or the Cross, p. 41.

[3] Tertullian: De Virginibus Velandis, Cap. I--"Regula quidem fidei una
omnino est, sola immobilis et irreformabilis."

[4] Vatican Council, July 18, 1870, First Dogmatic Constitution on the
Church of Christ, Chapter IV, Concerning the Infallible Teaching of the
Roman Pontiff.

[5] The Papal Syllabus of Errors, A. D. 1864, Sec. 1, 5.

[6] Exodus 6:3; Chap. 19.

[7] Exodus 33:22-23.

[8] Numbers 21:14.

[9] Exodus 15:3.

[10] Judges 11:24.

[11] I Samuel 26:19.

[12] II Kings 5:17.

[13] Jeremiah 23:24.

[14] Psalm 96:5.

[15] William Sanday: Christologies Ancient and Modern.

LECTURE V

THE PERILS OF PROGRESS

I

In the history of human thought and social organization there is an
interesting pendular swing between conflicting ideas so that, about the
time we wake up to recognize that thought is swinging one way, we may
be fairly sure that soon it will be swinging the other. Man's social
organization, for example, has moved back and forth between the two
poles of individual liberty and social solidarity. To