fields last for one more unknown genera- | if it will excite certain feelings. Let us tion? It is perfectly plain we do not. now reverse our suppositions. Let us The utter inefficacy of the motives sup. suppose the admittedly real thing to be plied by devotion to progress for its own our capacity for the feelings, and inquire sake, may at once be realized by compar- what grounds there are for believing in ing them with the motives supplied by the progress which is to excite them. Of devotion to it for the sake of Christianity. course the question is not one which can The least thing that the Christian does to be argued out in a page or two; but we others he does to Christ. However slight can take stock in a general way of what the result, Christ judges it by the effort the arguments are. The first feature that and the intention; a single mite may be strikes us in human history is change. valued by him as much as a thousand Do these changes follow any intelligible pounds; and however far away from us order? If so, to what extent do they folmay be the human beings we benefit, low it? And is it an order which can Christ, who is served through them, is afford us any rational satisfaction? Now near. But the naked doctrine of progress that they follow some intelligible order to has no idea in it at all analogous to this some extent is perfectly undeniable. The idea of Christ. Compared with Christian- advance of certain races from savagery to ity, it is like an optical instrument with civilization, and from a civilization that is some essential lens wanting. Christianity simple to a civilization that is complex, made our infinitesimal influence infinite; is a fact staring all of us in the face; scientific optimism makes our infinite and with regard to certain stages of this influence infinitesimal. advance, few people will seriously deny that it has been satisfactory. It is true that, putting aside all theological views of man, certain races of savages have in all probability been the happiest human animals that ever existed; still if we consider the earliest condition of the races that have become civilized, we may no doubt say that up to a certain point the advance of civilization made life a better thing for them. But is it equally plain that after a certain point has been past, the continuance of the advance has had the same sort of result? The inhabitants of France under Henri IV. may have been a happier set of men than its inhabitants under Clovis; but were its inhabitants under Louis XVI. a happier set of men than its inhabitants under Henri IV.? Again, if civilizations rise, civilizations also fall. Is it certain that the new civilizations which in time succeed the old bring the human lot to a veritably higher level? To answer these questions, or even to realize what these questions are, we must brand into our consciousness many considerations which, though when we think of them they are truisms, we too often forget to think of. To begin, then: progress for those who deny a God and a future life, means nothing, and can mean nothing but such changes as may make men happier; and this meaning again further unfolds itself into a reference first to the intensity of the happiness; secondly, to the numbers who partake in it. Thus, what is commonly called a superior civilization need not, after a certain step, indicate any real progress. It may even be a disguise of retrogression. It seems, for instance,

But perhaps it will be said that the idea of general progress is not supposed to move and stimulate us directly, but is embodied for each one of us in some homely and definite service which we can do to those about us; and that we do not do such service for the love of the race in general, but rise to the general love through doing the particular services. The answer to this is obvious. If this is all that is claimed for the idea of progress, all claim for it that it influences action is abandoned. It does not tend to make men energetic, philanthropic, and useful who are not so naturally. Such men it leaves exactly as it finds themthe selfish, selfish still, and the filthy, filthy still. It affects those only who act well independently of it; and all that it can be supposed to do for these is not to make them choose a particular line of conduct, but to give them a new excuse for being pleased with themselves at having chosen it. This brings us back to the question of mere feeling; and the feeling supposed to be produced by the idea of progress, we have already seen to be a mere fancy and illusion. Ás I have taken special care to point out, nobody claims for optimism that it supplies us with a rule of right. That is supplied by social science and experience. What is claimed for it is that it gives us new motives for obeying this rule, and a feeling of blessedness in the thought that it is being obeyed. We have now seen that in no appreciable way has it any tendency to give us either.

All this while we have been supposing that progress was a reality, and inquiring

hardly doubtful that in England the condi- | fore, not an absolute point, but a relative tion of the masses some fifty years ago point, beyond which advances in material was worse than it had been a hundred civilization are not progress any longeryears before. The factory system during not even supposing all classes to have a its earlier stages of development, though a proportionate share in it. Accordingly main element in the most rapid advances the fact that inventions multiply, that comof civilization ever known to the world, merce extends, that distances are annihidid certainly not add for the time to the lated, that country gentlemen have big sum-total of happiness. The mere fact battues, that farmers keep five hunters, that it did not do so for the time is in that their daughters despise butter-makitself no proof that it may not have done ing, and that even agricultural laborers so since; but it is a proof that the most have pink window-blinds, is not in itself startling advances in science, and the mas- any proof of general progress. Progress tery over nature that has come of them, is a tendency not to an extreme, but to a need not necessarily be things which, in mean. their immediate results, can give any satisfaction to the well-wishers of the race at large. But we may say more than this. Not only need material civilization indicate no progress in the lot of the race at large, but it may well be doubted if it really adds to the happiness of that part of the race who receive the fullest fruits of it. It is difficult in one sense to deny that express trains and Cunard steam ships are improvements on mail-coaches or wretched little sailing-boats like the Mayflower. But are the public in trains happier than the public who went in coaches? Is there more peace or hope in the hearts of the men who go from New York to Liverpool in six days than there was in the hearts of the Pilgrim Fathers? No doubt we who have been brought up amongst modern appliances should be made miserable for the time if they were suddenly taken away from us. But to say this is a very different thing from saying that we are happier with them than we should have been if we had never had them. A man would be miserable who, being fat and fifty, had to button himself into the waistcoat which he wore when he had a waist and was nineteen. But this does not prove that a large-sized waistcoat makes his middle age a happier time than his youth. Advancing civilization creates wants, and it supplies wants; it creates habits and it ministers to habits; but it is not always exhilarating us with fresh surprises of pleasure. Suppose, however, we grant that up to a certain point the increase of material wants, together with the means of meeting them, does add to happiness, it is perfectly evident that there is a point where this result ceases. A workman who dines daily off beefsteak and beer may be happier than one whose dinner is water and black bread; but a man whose dinner is ten different dishes need not be happier than the man who puts up with four. There is a certain point, there

Let us now pass to another class of facts, generally held to show that progress is a reality, namely, the great men that civilization has produced. Let us, for instance, take a Shakespeare, or a NewtoL, or a Goethe, and compare them with the Britons and the Germans of the time of Tacitus. Do we not see an image of progress there? To this argument there is more than one answer. It is an argument that points to something, but does not point to so much as those who use it might suppose. No doubt a man like Newton would be an impossibility in an age of barbarism; we may give to civilization the whole credit of producing him, and admit that he is an incalculable advance on the shrewdest of unlettered sav. ages. But though we find that civilizations produce greater men than barbarism we do not find that the modern civilizations produce greater men than the ancient. Were they all to meet in the Elysian Fields Newton would probably not find Euclid his inferior, nor would Thucydides show like a dwarf by Professor Freeman. Further, not only do the limits of exceptional greatness show no tendency to expand, but the existence, at any point, of excep. tionally great men is no sure indication of any answering elevation amongst the masses, any more than the existence of exceptionally rich men is a sure indication that the masses are not poor. The intellectual superiority of Columbus to the American savages was, unfortunately, no sign that his followers were not in many ways inferior to them.

What, then, is the evidence that progress, in the sense of an increasing happiness for an increasing number, is really a continuous movement running through all the changes of history? It cannot be said that there are no facts which suggest such a conclusion, but they are absurdly insuffi cient in number, and they are balanced by others equally weighty, and of quite an

opposite character. Isolated periods, iso- | sided waters, are larger, higher, or more lated institutions, do indeed very strik- important than the last. This is true even ingly exhibit the movement in question. of the parts of such movements as history One of the most remarkable instances of principally records; but of the part which it is the development of the Church of for our modern optimists is the most imRome, looked at from the Catholic stand-portant, which is, indeed, the only im point. Again, we constantly find periods in a nation's history during which the national happiness has demonstrably moved onwards. Few of the phenomena on which the faith in progress rests have given to that faith such a violent stimulus as the rapid movement observable in such periods. A case in point is the immense and undoubted improvement which during the past forty years has taken place in the condition of the working classes in England; and no doubt, in spite of the ruinous price paid for it, France purchased by the Revolution an improvement not dissimilar. But these movements are capable of an interpretation very different from that which our sanguine optimists put on them. They resemble a cure from an exceptional disease rather than any strengthening of the normal health. The French Revolution has been thought by many to have been a chopping up of society and a boiling of it in Medea's caldron, from whence it should issue forth born into a new existence. In reality it resembled an ill-performed surgical operation, which may possibly have saved the nation's life, but has shattered its nerves and disfigured it till this day. Whilst as for ordinary democratic reforms—and this is plainest with regard to those which have been most really needed — their utmost effect has been to cure a temporary pain, not to add a permanent pleasure. They have been pills, they have not been elixirs.*

portant part for them, history can hardly be said to have left any general record at all. The important part of such movements is their relation to the happiness of the masses. Does any one pretend that we have any materials for tracing through the historic ages the fluctuations in the lot of the unnamed multitudes? Here and there some riot, some servile war, or some Jacquerie, shows us that at a certain period the masses in some special district were miserable, and we can trace through other periods some legal amelioration of their lot. But taking the historic periods of the world as a whole, the history of the happiness or the misery of the majority is a book of which everything has perished except some scattered fragments, the gaps between which can be only filled up by conjecture, in many cases not even by that; which fail to suggest in any serious way that the happiness of the multitudes concerned has followed any intelligible order, and which certainly negative the supposition that there has been any continuous advance in it. Mr. Harrison says that in three thousand years progress should at least be appreciable to the naked eye. Will Mr. Harrison, or any one else, maintain as scientifically demonstrated, that the children whipped to their work in our earlier English factories were happier than the Egyptian brick-makers amongst the melons and the flesh-pots ?

There is, however, another hypothesis The most authenticated cases, then, possible, which may give the doctrine of which we have of any genuine progress progress a more scientific character. It are to all appearance mere accidents and may be said that though the changes of episodes. They are not analogous to a history hitherto have been seemingly man progressing, but to a tethered animal vague and meaningless, they have been which has slipped getting up on its legs really preparatory for a movement which again. As to the larger movements which is about to begin now. Telegraphs, ocean form the main feature of history, such as steamers, express trains, and printing. the rise of the Roman Empire, these presses have, it may be admitted, done movements, like waves, are always ob- little for the general happiness as yet; served to spend themselves; and it is their importance may have been slight if impossible to prove, without some aid we regard them as mere luxuries; but all from theology, that the new waves which this while they have been knitting the have shaped themselves out of the sub-races of men together; they have been

The causes of material or national advance will be probably recognized in time as being mainly, though not entirely, due to the personal ambitions of a gifted and vigorous minority; and the processes which are now regarded as signs of a universal progress, are constant cures, or attempts at cures, of the evils or maladjustments which are at first incident to any important change.

making the oneness of humanity a visible and accomplished fact; and very soon we shall all of us start in company on a march towards the higher things that the future has in store for us. What shall we say to some idea of this sort that progress is a certainty henceforward, though it may

have been doubtful hitherto? The idea | Mr. Harrison himself. He says that if a is a pleasant one for the fancy to dwell consummation in Heaven is to have the upon, and it is easy to see how it may least real influence over us, it is "not have been suggested by facts. But facts enough to talk of it in general terms." certainly give us no assurance that it is The all-important point," he proceeds, true; they do but suggest it, as a cloud "is what kind of Heaven? Is it a Heaven may suggest a whale. It is no doubt of seraphic beatitude and unending hallelueasier to conceive the possibility of a gen- jabs as imagined by Dante and Milton, or eral onward movement in the future than a life of active exertion? And if of active it is to conceive that of it as a reality in exertion (and what can life mean without the past. Indeed no one can demonstrate exertion?) of what kind of exertion?” that it will not actually take place. All I Now with regard to Heaven it would be wish to point out is that there is no cer- perfectly easy to show that this demand tainty that it will; and not only no cer- for exact knowledge is unreasonable and tainty, but no balance of probability. The unnecessary; for part of the attraction of existing civilization, which some think so the alleged beatitude of Heaven consists stable, and which seems, as I have said, in the belief that it passes our finite underto be uniting us into one community, con- standing, that we can only dimly augur it, tains in itself many elements of decay or and that we shall be changed before we of self-destruction. In spite of the way are admitted to it. But with regard to in which the Western races seem to have any blessed consummation on the earth, covered the globe with the network of such details as Mr. Harrison asks for are their power and commerce, they are out absolutely indispensable. Our optimists numbered at this day in a proportion of tell us that, on the expiration of a practimore than two to one, by the vast nations cal eternity, there will be the beginnings who are utterly impervious to their in- at any rate of a blessed and glorious fluence-impervious to their ideas, and change in the human lot. In Mr. Harriindifferent to their aspirations. What son's words, I say, What kind of change? scientific estimate then can be made of Will it be a change tending to make life a the influence on the future of the Moham- round of idle luxury, or a course of active medan and Buddhist populations, to say exertion? And if of active exertion, of nothing of the others equally alien to our what kind of exertion? Will it be practicivilization, who alone outnumber the en- cal or speculative? Will it be discovertire brotherhood of the West? Who can ing new stars, or making new dyes out of forecast to take a single instance the coal-tar? No one can tell us. part which may in the future be played by China? And again, who can forecast the effects of over-population? And who can fail to foresee that they may be far-reaching and terrible? How, in the face of disturbing elements like these, can the future of progress be anything more than a guess, a hope, an opinion, a poetic fancy? At all events, whatever it is, it is certainly not science.

On one point no doubt we should find a consensus of opinion; but this point would be negative, not positive. We should be told that poverty, overwork, most forms of sickness, and acute pain would be absent; and surely it may be said that this is a consummation fit to be striven for. No doubt it is; but from the optimist's point of view, this admission does absolutely nothing to help us. The problem Let us, however, suppose that it is sci- is to construct a life of superlative happience. Let us suppose that we have fullness; and to eliminate physical suffering and sufficient evidence to convince us of is merely to place us on the naked threshthe reality and continuance of a move-old of our enterprise. Suppose I see in ment, slow indeed as its exponents admit the street one day some poor orphan girl, it to be, but evidently in the direction of some happy consummation in the future. Now what, let us ask, will this consummation be? It is put before us by the creed of optimism as the ultimate justification of all our hope and enthusiasm, and, as Mr. Morley says, of our "provisional acquiescence" in the existing sorrows of the world. Does any one, then, profess to be able to describe it exactly to us? To ask this is no idle question. Its importance can be proved by reference to

utterly desolate, and crying as if her heart would break. That girl is certainly not happy. Let us suppose I see the same girl next day, equally desolate, but distracted by an excruciating toothache. I could not restore her parents to her, but I can, we will say, cure her toothache, and I do. I ease her of a terrible pain. I cause her unutterable relief; and no doubt in doing so I myself feel happy; but as to the orphan all I do is this I restore her to her original misery. And so far as the