But
God, found, if at all, in the terms of a present process, is not
static and absolute, but dynamic and relative; indefinite, incomplete,
not final. And man's immense difference from Him, that sense of
the immeasurable space between creator and created, is strangely
contracted. The gulf between holiness and guiltiness tends also to
disappear. For our life would appear to be plastic and indefinite,
a process rather than a state, not open then to conclusive moral
estimates; incomplete, not fallen; life an orderly process, hence not
perverse but defensible; without known breaks or infringements, hence
relatively normal and sufficiently intelligible.
A second factor was the rise of the humane sciences. In the seventh
and eighth decades of the last century men were absorbed in the
discovery of the nature and extent of the material universe. But
beginning about 1890, interest swerved again toward man as its
most revealing study and most significant inhabitant. Anthropology,
ethnology, sociology, physical and functional psychology, came to
the front. Especially the humane studies of political science and
industrial economics were magnified because of the new and urgent
problems born of an industrial civilization and a capitalistic state.
The invention and perfection of the industrial machine had by now
thoroughly dislocated former social groupings, made its own ethical
standards and human problems.
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