time: the refreshing river 



sixteentli century^ and the Levellers of the seventeenth^ all adopted 

 religious language and modes of thought. It is not to be suggested 

 that any special significance attaches to this fact, for they had no 

 other language or modes of thought at their disposal. But the essential 

 point is that in all the best aspects of Christianity, in those directions 

 in which it has least turned its back upon human life and simple 

 human happiness, the conviction of the reality of progress in time 

 has been present. A time came when the old law gave place to the 

 new. A time came when the people would suffer no longer the oppres- 

 sion of unchristian princes, but actually rose against them, and for a 

 longer or shorter period withstood them. A time would eventually 

 come when the Kingdom of God would be set up on earth, and a 

 new world-order of love and comradeship would come into being. 



With such words, we may seem to have travelled far from the cool 

 consideration of biological and social evolution. But in fact we are 

 not far removed from it, for there is a natural affinity between millen- 

 arism and evolutionary naturalism. Such primitive Christian ideas 

 do justice to time and to progress, and in wandering, as a young man, 

 from one theological realm to another, your lecturer came to see 

 that the reality of time was fundamentally important. When he then 

 returned to take up again the locus classicus of neo-platonic pessimism, 

 the essay of W. R. Inge on progress,^ it seemed to him, in spite of 



^ Cf. K. Kautsky, Communism in Central Europe in the Time of the Reformation 

 (London 1897), and R. Pascal, The Social Basis of the German Reformation (London, 1933). 

 Cf. E. Bernstein, Cromwell and Communism (London, 1930). 



^ "The Idea of Progress" in Outspoken Essays, voL ii (London, 1923). It must with 

 regret be recorded that some ten years afterwards Inge, in his Spencer Lecture for 1934, 

 "Liberty and Natural Rights," gave his official blessing to fascism as the best form of 

 human society yet devised. Opposition to the idea of progress is, indeed, a characteristic 

 common to all fascist philosophers. Examples are easy to find. "The materialist outlook," 

 wrote Otto Strasser, "has, as is well known, the idea of progress as one of its motive 

 forces. There is no worse sort of fatalism than this spiritual hallucination that humanity 

 has for millions of years now been marching along a road which leads for ever upward, 

 decorated on the right and left with the milestones of development. How has this fixed 

 idea become possible? Surely everyone knows from his own experience that life is a 

 circle, not a line" (/F/r suchen Deutschland, p. 165). So also Othmar Spann: "Darwin 

 and Marx have done terrible harm to our civilisation by their mechanical" {sic) "con- 

 ception of development. For this conception of development deprives every activity 

 of value since today each one is overcome by tomorrow. And this has given birth to 

 utilitarianism, materialism, and nihilism" {sic) "which are characteristic of our time" 

 {Kategorienlehre, 1924, p. 211). And the Russian Orthodox Church adds its mite to the 

 treasury. It has an Inge of its own. "The Humanism of the Renaissance," writes Berdyaev, 

 "has not strengthened man but weakened him; that is the paradoxical denouement of 

 modem history. . . . European man strode into modern history full of confidence in 

 himself and his creative powers, in this dawn everything seemed to depend upon his 



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