f high intelligence with low desires." Was Nebuchadnezzar of
Babylon unintelligent? Caesar and Napoleon--were they unintelligent?
Has the most monumental and destructive selfishness in human history been
associated with poor minds? No, with great minds, which, if the world
was to be saved their devastation, needed to be reborn into a new spirit.
The transforming gospel which religion brings is indispensable to a
building of the kingdom of righteousness upon the earth.

Wherever one listens, then, to the typical teaching of modern Christians,
he finds himself in the atmosphere of the idea of progress. Men's
thoughts of God, of Christ, of the Church, of hope, their methods of
apologetic, are shaped to that mold--are often thinned out and flattened
down and made cheap and unconvincing by being shaped to that mold--so
that an endeavour to achieve an intelligent understanding of
Christianity's relationship with the idea of progress is in part a
defensive measure to save the Gospel from being unintelligently mauled
and mishandled by it. Marcus Dods, when he was an old man, said: "I do
not envy those who have to fight the battle of Christianity in the
twentieth century." Then, after a moment, he added, "Yes, perhaps I do,
but it will be a stiff fight." It is a stiff fight, and for this reason
if for no other, that before we can get on much further in a progressive
world we must achieve with wisdom and courage some fundamental
reconstructions in our Christian thinking.

[1] Aratus of Soli: Phaenomena, lines 122-3.

[2] Lucius Annaeus Seneca: Naturalium Quaestionum, Liber VII, 25.

[3] T. Lucretius Carus: De Rerum Natura, Lib. V, 1455--"Paullatim docuit
pedetentim progredienteis."

[4] Marcus Aurelius Antoninus: Meditations, IX, 28; VI, 37; XI, 1.

[5] Andrew D. White: A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in
Christendom, Vol. I, p. 97.

[6] Roger Bacon: Epistola de Secretis Operibus Artis et Naturae, et de
Nullitate Magiae, Caput IV, in Opera Quaedam Hactenus Inedita, edited by
J. S. Brewer, p. 533.

[7] Jerome Cardan: De Subtilitate, Liber Decimusseptimus: De artibus,
artificiosisque rebus.

[8] Edward Winslow: Hypocrisie Unmasked, p. 97.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Blaise Pascal: Opuscules, Preface to the Treatise on Vacuum, in The
Thoughts, Letters and Opuscules of Blaise Pascal, Translated by O. W.
Wight, p. 550.

[11] Alfred Tennyson: Locksley Hall Sixty Years After.

[12] Comte de Saporta: Le M