In glancing at the cause of this unchanged susceptibility to religious credulity--unchanged while the world has been making such strides in the acquisition of exact information--we may find a summing up of the situation in Macaulay's blunt declaration that "natural theology is not a progressive science; a Christian of the fifth century with a Bible is on a par with a Christian of the nineteenth century with a Bible." The "orthodox" believer in that Bible can only seek a better understanding of it by studying it himself and accepting the deductions of other students. Nothing, as the centuries have passed, has been added to his definite knowledge of his God or his own future existence. When, therefore, some one, like a Swedenborg or a Joseph Smith, appears with an announcement of an addition to the information on this subject, obtained by direct revelation from on high, he supplies one of the greatest desiderata that man is conscious of, and we ought, perhaps, to wonder that his followers are not so numerous, but so few. Progress in medical science would no longer permit any body like the College of the Physicians of London to recognize curative value in the skull of a person who had met with a violent death, as it did in the seventeenth century; but the physician of the seventeenth century with a pharmacopoeia was not "on a par with" a physician of the nineteenth century with a pharmacopoeia. Nor has man changed in his mental susceptibilities as the centuries have advanced. It is a failure to recognize this fact which leads observers like Ferris to find it so marvellous that a belief like Mormonism should succeed in the nineteenth century. Draper's studies of man's intellectual development led him to declare that "man has ever been the same in his modes of thought and motives of action, and to assert his purpose to judge past occurrences in the same way as those of our own time."* So Macaulay refused to accept the doctrine that "the world is constantly becoming more and more enlightened," asserting that "the human mind, instead of marching, merely marks time." Nothing offers stronger confirmation of the correctness of these views than the history of religious beliefs, and the teachings connected therewith since the death of Christ. * "Intellectual Development of Europe," Vol. II, Chap. 3.