INTRODUCTORY 3 



portance of what our age is doing in the history of civilisa- 

 tion. In the first place we can look at it only from one 

 standpoint — that of the past. It needed at least an 

 Erasmus to predict the outcome of the Reformation from 

 all that preceded the Diet of Worms. Or, to adopt a 

 metaphor, a blind man climbing a hill might have a con- 

 siderable appreciation of the various degrees of steepness 

 in the parts he had traversed, and he might even have a 

 reasonable amount of certainty as to the slope whereon 

 he was standing for the time being, but whether that slope 

 led immediately to a steeper ascent, or was practically the 

 top, it would be impossible for him to say. In the next 

 place we are too close to our age, both in position and feel- 

 ing, to appreciate without foreshortening and personal 

 prejudice the magnitude of the changes which are un- 

 doubtedly taking place. 



The contest of opinion in nearly every field of thought 

 — the struggle of old and new standards in every sphere 

 of activity, in religion, in commerce, in social life — touch 

 the spiritual and physical needs of the individual far too 

 nearly for him to be a dispassionate judge of the age in 

 which he lives. That we play our parts in an era of 

 rapid social change can scarcely be doubted by any one 

 who regards attentively the marked contrasts presented 

 by our modern society. It is an era alike of great self- 

 assertion and of excessive altruism ; we see the highest in 

 tellectual poweraccompanied by the strangest recrudescenc 

 of superstition ; there is a strong socialist drift and yet 

 not a few remarkable individualist teachers ; the extremes 

 of religious faith and of unequivocal freethought are found 

 jostling each other. Nor do these opposing traits exist 

 only in close social juxtaposition. The same individual 

 mind, unconscious of its own want of logical consistency, 

 will often exhibit our age in microcosm. 



It is little wonder that we have hitherto made small 

 way towards a common estimate of what our time is really 

 contributing to the history of human progress. The one 

 man finds in our age a restlessness, a distrust of authority, 

 a questioning of the basis of all social institutions and 



