working out his own destiny, and doing it ill. We see him, like some
pedlar plodding along a country road under his burdens, carrying through
whole centuries institutions and ideas and follies that he will
eventually shed. When he drops them, there is no more element of
miracle or revelation in his action than when he discovers the use of
steam or of aluminium or of the spectroscope. His mind expands and his
ideals rise. It is a little incongruous to suppose that some infinitely
wiser and affectionate parent was looking on all the time and giving no
assistance. In the dialogue between Mephistopheles and God which Goethe
prefixes to his _Faust_, the devil obviously scores. In the sight of
such an intelligence man must have made a pretty fool of himself during
the last 1500 years. We human beings are more charitable. Take the whole
story as the gradual development of human intelligence and emotion under
unfavourable political conditions, hampered by a despotic and perverse
clergy, and it seems natural enough.

This is the impression one gets from history, and the nearer history is
to our own time and the better we know it, the less it suggests a divine
guidance. There is something parochial or rural about the average
Christian way of looking at events. One day the German Christian goes to
church to thank God for driving the Russians out of East Prussia; the
next day the English Christian thanks the same God for killing or
wounding 20,000 Germans at Neuve Chapelle--with the help of 350 guns.
Yet such things as these are the only claims we have offered to us of
the action of God in human events. Neither the steps that man takes
onward nor the steps that he takes backward are ascribed to divine
influence. All that is claimed is that when a ship goes down, for
instance, he saves the saved, and "permits" the rest to be drowned; when
a war has been raging for a few months by his "permission," he puts a
stop to it when one army is worn out. The unbeliever is really entitled