After
them it became a huge industrial empire of ramified international
relationships.
The second factor in the situation was the intellectual and spiritual
nature of the society which these inventions entered. It was, as we
have seen, essentially humanistic. It believed much in the natural
rights of man. The individual was justified, by the natural order, in
seeking his separate good. If he only sought it hard enough and well
enough the result would be for the general welfare of society. Thus at
the moment when mechanical invention offered unheard-of opportunities
for material expansion and lucrative business, the thought and feeling
of the community pretty generally sanctioned an individualistic
philosophy of life. The result was tragic if inevitable. The new
industrial order offered both the practical incentive and the
theoretical justification for institutional declension from humane
to primitive standards. It is not to be supposed that men slipped
deliberately into paganism; the human mind is not so sinister as it
is stupid nor so cruel as it is unimaginative nor so brutal as it
is complacent. For the most part we do not really understand, in
our daily lives, what we are about. Hence society degenerated, as
it always does, in the confident and stubborn belief that it was
improving the time and doing God's service. But He that sitteth in the
heavens must have laughed, He must have had us in derision!
For upon what law, natural, human, divine, has this new empire been
founded? That it has produced great humanists is gratefully
conceded; that real spiritual progress has issued from its incidental
cosmopolitanism is manifest; but which way has it fronted, what have
been its characteristic emphases and its controlling tendencies?
Let its own works testify.
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