304 FROM COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART iv 



failures. Intellectually, too, it was exhausted ; it was 

 the transmitter rather than the possessor and enjoyer 

 of the great classical culture. The barbarian inroads, 

 Sir Henry Maine tells us, may have saved Europe 

 from the fate of China. Intellect was exhausted; 

 morality also, as in all protracted civilisations hith- 

 erto, had suffered deep perversion. What will guar- 

 antee us against a recurrence of such failure? A 

 recurrence would be decisive. There are no unspoiled 

 barbarian races to take up the torch once more 

 and carry it onwards. 



Now there are two advantages on the side of the 

 modern world. We have a better method in physical 

 science, and we have a better religion, or the religion 

 we share with the Christianised empire is better 

 acclimatised in our soil. Either the intellectual or 

 the moral revival; either the Renaissance or the 

 Reformation. In hoc signo vincemus. 



Physical science is no doubt a great and a lasting 

 boon. Discoveries large and small are made, and will 

 be made ; they pay so well. Bacon was right in his 

 enthusiastic eulogies on the " fruitfulness " of the 

 science which he dimly foresaw. But that is hardly 

 the question. Even without much physical science 

 the humane culture of the great ancient world had 

 vast powers for intellectual progress. In spite of 

 this it broke down. Can science as applied to physi- 

 cal nature really guarantee the world against moral 

 paralysis ? 



Others will hold with Mr. Lecky that the decisive 

 factors in progress are moral, and not perhaps 

 with Mr. Lecky that in Christianity, or, as Chris- 

 tians prefer to say in Jesus Christ, and in Him alone, 



