says, ’Ancient views of life bore throughout an unhistorical character.  The numerous philosophical doctrines of the procession of endless similar cycles, which continually return to the starting-point, were only the expression of the conviction that all movement at bottom brings nothing new and that life offers no prospect of further improvement.’  When Paul discovered that the law was a schoolmaster to bring men to Christ, he enunciated a profounder philosophy of history than Plato ever knew.

The very fact that Christianity sprang out of Judaism means that it enshrines and suggests the idea of progress in the very circumstances of its origin.  But its hold on the idea is something deeper than its connexion with Judaism.  Christianity claims to be the final religion, but its claim differs in kind from the parallel claim of Mohammedanism.  The world of Islam is held in mortmain by the prophet.  It cannot advance beyond the forms in which he embodied his message without denying the claims he made for himself.  But to the early Christians the synoptic gospels were the record of all that Jesus began to do and to say, while the highest development of Christian experience and reflection in the New Testament, the gospel of John, contemplates the greater things which the followers of Jesus shall accomplish and the fuller revelations which shall come as the disciples are able to bear them.  The claim of Christianity to finality rests on its opening up endless possibilities of spiritual growth to mankind.  To some of us it seems that part of this fuller revelation has come through modern knowledge and discovery.  The faith in progress which Christians have often held falteringly and have sometimes denied, appears to be confirmed and clarified by all that we are learning of creative evolution.  In any case, the influence of modern science has tended to produce a faith in progress in the West—­a faith which some regard as essentially different from the Christian view of the world and history, but which for others seems more and more to coalesce with that earlier if in some respects cruder Christian conviction.  No doubt when the facts of evolution were held to point to gradual and continuous development, they favoured a view of steady progress which was antagonistic to the Christian belief in the sudden introduction of new elements into history.  But the later advances of evolutionary theory seem more akin to the early Christian attitude.  The element of apocalyptic is seen not to be so alien from nature as had been at first supposed.

However it arises and whatever form it takes, this faith in progress is characteristic of the Western outlook, and gives a positive answer to the question, Is life worth living?  That such a faith is strange to India may be evidenced by the reception accorded to the poet Tagore in India itself.  Mr. Yeats gives us the judgement of a Bengali who said of Tagore, ’He is the first among our saints who has not refused to live, but spoken out of Life itself, and that is why we give him our love.’  Now Tagore’s genius is thoroughly Indian, but his originality in this respect is due directly or indirectly to contact with the influence of the West.  It is our belief in action and in the worth of human achievement which is voiced in his poems and in his philosophy, and the note is new in India.