About the idea of moral progress, which is only another name for the idea of progress in its widest form, I need say little, the question having been adequately treated by other lecturers. But I will add this. Belief in moral progress is a belief which no man can live without, and, at the same time, a belief which cannot be proved by any appeal to human experience. We cannot live without it, because life is just the process of reaching forward to a better form of itself. Were a man to say that since the world began no moral progress has taken place he would thereby show his latent belief in moral progress. For no man would take the trouble to deny moral progress unless he believed that the world would in some way be made better by his denial. He would not even trouble to come to a private conclusion in the matter unless he believed that his private conclusion was something to the good. In that sense perhaps we may say that moral progress is proved, for the best proof of any belief is that it remains indispensable to the life we have to live. But the appeal to experience would not prove it--and for this reason. A progressive world is a world which not only makes gains, but _keeps_ its gains when they are made. If the Kingdom of Heaven were to become a fact to-morrow, that of itself would not prove progress, if you admit the possibility that the world might hereafter retreat from the position it had won. That possibility you could never rule out--except by an appeal to faith. A world which attained the goal and then lost it would be a greater failure, from the point of view of moral progress, than one which never attained the goal at all. The doctrine that the gains of morality can never be lost is widely held; but it does not rest on a philosophic or a scientific basis. As Hume taught long ago, you cannot infer an infinite conclusion from finite data--and in this case the conclusion is infinite and the data are finite. They are not only finite but various: some pointing one way, some another.