What, then, can we read not into, but out of, the tragic spectacle now being enacted, not merely before but in, through, and by us? Unless we have all along been mistaken, the victims of mere delusion and error, here, too, there has been and still is Progress. Primarily and principally what is taking place, is a tremendous revelation of the potencies which in our nature--in that which makes us men--have escaped our notice and therefore, because unseen or ignored, working in the dark, have not yet been drawn upon and utilized. There has been and still is going on, an enormous increase of self-knowledge. At first sight this seems wholly an opening up of undreamt-of evil. Side by side there has come to us a parallel revelation of undreamt-of good. I must bear witness to my conviction that we are beholding a tremendous inrush or uprush of good into man and his world. But what I wish to dwell upon is the growing and ever-confirmed revelation of an intimate relation or connexion between the two which is the very spring of Progress, viz. that the supply of good is not only adequate and more than adequate to the utmost demand made upon it, in the combating of the evil, and that for this reason, that while on the one hand the evil that impedes or counter-works the good is itself of spiritual origin, its existence and power is conditioned by the law that it must evoke and stimulate the very power which it attempts to crush and defeat. This is, as I have said, the now discovered and known spring of Progress both within and without us, that whatsoever is evil, evil just because it is enacted and does not merely occur, passes within the reach of knowledge and understanding, and in the measure that it passes into the light, not merely loses its sting and its force, but is convertible and converted into a strengthening condition of that which in its first appearance it seemed merely to thwart. Even regress is seen to be a necessary incident in progress, and the seasons which we call periods of decadence to be occasions in which the spirit progresses in secret, recruiting itself not by idleness or rest, but genuinely refreshing and recreating itself.