Illustrations of this belief in progress and activity are superfluous, though I may remind you of the prevalence of this temper in the realm of philosophy as well as of religion at the present time.  Perhaps it is worth recalling that Harnack’s great history of dogma ends with this significant sentence from Zwingli:  ’It is not the part of a Christian man to be for ever talking grandly about dogma, but always to be attempting big things in fellowship with God.’  This represents as well as anything our Western insistence on the worth of effort.  As an admirable embodiment at once of the faith in humanity and the faith in progress, the close of Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘Rugby Chapel’ recurs to the mind.  You remember how he conceives the function of great men to lie in preserving the union of mankind, and how he conceives the life of mankind as a journey towards a city that hath foundations.

These two characteristics, faith in the oneness of mankind and in the reality of progress, do add a sense of common aspiration to the civilization of the West.  But of themselves they do not create a very close unity.  Men may believe in human solidarity and in the worth of effort, and yet be following divergent ideals and divisive enthusiasms.  These beliefs are surrounded by haze and indefiniteness.  In themselves they scarcely constitute a religion that will satisfy, much less one that can effectively unite us.  However fully we share them, they will not enable us to meet and surmount the present crisis.  So far as I can judge, these vaguer beliefs in humanity and progress are largely the deposit of Christian faith, and to be rendered effective they need to be ever reconnected with the central elements in that faith; in particular, with the Christian judgement on sin and with the Christian devotion to the historic Jesus.

The sense of sin has received a peculiar impress in the West.  We owe it largely to the religious experience of the Jew and to the seriousness of the Latin mind.  There is a curious coincidence of the seventh chapter of Romans with a famous quotation from Ovid.  The Latin fathers, particularly Augustine, have developed, not to say over-developed, the analysis of sin.  The concept of sin never had the same significance for the Greek, and humanism has always resented the severity of the tradition that comes from Paul through Augustine and Calvin.  Mr. Holmes’s stimulating books on education are inspired by a theological polemic against the doctrine of original sin.  He not unnaturally takes refuge in Buddhism, for Buddhism makes suffering, not sin, the root trouble of human life.  ’The division between the will and the power, the struggle of the senses against our better judgement, the falling below the moral ideal—­none of all this comes within the horizon of Buddha.’  Now it may freely be confessed that the Calvinist view of sin led to a distrust of human nature, and incidentally of child-nature, which had a not altogether healthy