ABSTRACT
Progressive development is most unmistakably apparent in two aspects of the career of mankind, namely, in the advance of material culture and of social justice. If the material aspects of human progress are apt to be dismissed as husks and externals, the same cannot be so readily done as regards the advance in the conditions of social justice, which, however imperfectly achieved, has been no less continuous than that of human control over material conditions. The connection of the moral progress that marks the modern age with its scientific and material achievements is not accidental. In the ages of faith the disorder of human society was seriously believed to correspond to the order of the universe, and people blamed God for abominations for which only the Church of God was responsible, and themselves for putting up with it. The mental deformities by which the blunders of existing civilisations are strenuously upheld have nothing whatever to do with human nature.
