This faith, often blind and unreasoned, is distinctly Western and modern. We do not derive it even from Greece. It comes to us through Christianity and modern science. The absence of any such faith in activity and progress creates the pessimism of the East. Hinduism and Buddhism are alike in their bankruptcy on this side. The majestic religious philosophy of India sees in history only an endless and meaningless repetition. Thucydides and Plato assume the same view, if I mistake not. As Eucken 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