time: the refreshing river 



as we used to sing as children. But now we have no further interest 

 in this over-individuaHstic type of Christianity; those who are pre- 

 pared to "work illegally, and be anonymous" that the Kingdom may 

 come, find that this attitude has no meaning for them. Nor will they 

 be depressed by the cultured hopelessness of T. S. Eliot in "East 

 Coker":— 



"And so each venture 

 Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate 

 With shabby equipment always deteriorating 

 In the general mess of imprecision of feeling. 

 Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer 

 By strength and submission, has already been discovered 

 Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope 

 To emulate — but there is no competition — 

 There is only the fight to recover what has been lost 

 And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions 

 That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. 

 For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business." 



Again, this is too individualist. Time is for all men a refreshing 

 river; not merely a perpetual recurrence of opportunities for individual 

 souls to scale the heights of mystical experience or to produce great 

 artistic achievement or to break free from the wheel of things or to 

 attain perfect nonactivity, or whatever metaphor of individual per- 

 fection you happen to like. The historical process is the organiser of 

 the City of God, and those who work at its building are (in the 

 ancient language) the ministers of the Most High. Of course there 

 have been setbacks innumerable, but the curve of the development of 

 human society pursues its way across the graph of history with 

 statistical certainty, heeding neither the many points which fall 

 beneath it, nor those many more hopeful ones which lie above its 

 average sweep. 



Instances of dialectical development in scientific thought are so 

 numerous that a few moments' thought provides an embarrassingly 

 large selection. All science progresses by new hypotheses which 

 combine in a synthetic way, not by mere compromise, the truest 

 points in the preceding hypotheses. Deadlocks are thus overcome. 

 Thus in embryology we know now that both egg and sperm are 

 essential contributions to generation from the tvv^o parents, but in the 

 1 8th century and well into the 19th this was not understood. The 



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