The remark is frequently made that the modern world is tending to return to the Greek view of life. If by the Greek view of life is meant the outlook characteristic of the Greeks of the classic period--the era of Plato, Pericles, and Sophocles,--there is much truth in the judgment. Human values are again coming uppermost in men's minds. This life is not a sojourn in a vale of tears, but the scene of the attempts of socially-minded, conscious organisms to achieve a temperate and fairly happy existence. But the centuries intervening have not been without their effect; man's moral horizon has been both deepened and enlarged. Since those halcyon days, man has eaten of the tree of good and {185} evil, he has fought with shadowy monsters and wandered for years in the wilderness of helplessness and pessimism, he has worshiped at the shrine of strange gods and prostrated himself before the terrors of his own imagination. Slowly he has come to stand erect and look about him and see the world and himself as they actually are. Knowledge has become his most trusted instrument, and democratic sympathy with human life his most cherished guide. With such a guide and with such an instrument, he will before long set about to mold his life in accordance with those mellower ideals which have grown in his heart during his long pilgrimage. At last, man is becoming an adult able to stand upon his feet and to look keenly around with a measuring glance at things as they are. Will he not work for the sweet fruition of those human values which are dear to his very soul--home, children, kindly social intercourse, work which gives self-expression, art, knowledge, contentment, all suffused with the vigor of healthy bodies and the sleep of quiet nights? Man will surely come to desire greatly, and achieve magnificently, and live courageously. Now that the ethical degradation of the industrial revolution has been stayed and society has turned its face from the clatter of mass-production for its own sake, now that ethical reflection has been united with reason and science in a sane realism, now that sympathy is abroad in the land, now that democracy with its conception of human brotherhood is astir throughout the world, ethics has secured a firm foundation in the free aspirations of free men. If noble character and rational conduct cannot maintain themselves in such a society, then the theologian can rightly say that man is {186} by nature corrupt. But the present is a time of growing loyalties to the common good and of vigorous search for the efficient means to attain it in greater measure. The great spiritual adventures of the future will surely be human and humane. {187} CHAPTER XIV THE CHURCH AS AN INSTITUTION--THE CATHOLIC CHURCH