Why this swift renunciation of that which has made for profounder life in our ancestors, and the loud cry of Progress as the treasure slips away? There is no age which has known in theory so much regarding orderly development in human affairs, the growth of the present from the past, and no age which has shown so little sense of the deeper meaning of these laws. The human race has never talked so much of continuity, and never, perhaps, has it made so sharp a turn. Modern science has taught us much concerning organic growth, cause, and effect as dominating the physical world; evolutionary theory is the basis of our study of language, of literature, of all human institutions. Clearly and unmistakably comes the teaching of our time that, in all aspects of life, the present is rooted in the past, indissolubly united in unbroken chain; but, curiously enough, whereas the law has been grasped in connection with matters material, matters intellectual, matters æsthetic, in matters spiritual there is a sudden halt or break. We prattle learnedly of evolution, but we have little conception of it in that which should be the deepest concern of life, the development of the soul. Nature, we are told, admits no gaps, yet it would seem that the great modern majority turns abruptly from the faith which has sustained human life from generation to generation, ignoring, as no age before has done, the best in the past. In so doing, does it not repudiate the law upon which our understanding of everything else is based? Distrusting in the study of physical life any theory not based upon ideas of growth, sequence, old custom, in matters spiritual we demand the fresh, the untried; not for reverence of that which has been attained, but because we find an idea startling and original, do we welcome it. When Bergson assures us that an element of will is to be reckoned with in all growth, is it because we have drifted so near enslavement to a purely mechanical system of thought that we hail this as new doctrine and therefore acceptable? If it were whispered abroad that the idea is of unimaginable antiquity, that it has been at the basis of every ethical system ever founded, would his large audiences dwindle? If the idea of God, of immortality, could be advertised among the novelties, instead of among the long inheritances, who would refuse to believe? Belief in the universe as essentially spiritual, God-created; belief in the deathlessness of the human soul, belief in right-doing in the light of these great faiths, have been associated with the age-long growth of the race; can we ignore, or lightly cast aside, that which has been at the very heart of the spiritual evolution of our forefathers?