There is in every age a vanity by which men suppose themselves newly made because much around them is new. They look upon their instruments and their learning, and because these things would have astonished their fathers, they begin to imagine that they themselves have become another sort of creature. Yet I do not believe this to be so. We have altered much in the condition of life, but little, perhaps nothing, in the condition of man.
The fundamentals are not committed unto civilization for alteration. A cruelty may be abolished, and this is good, but cruelty itself does not thereby leave the earth. An old greed may become shameful while another grows respectable in its place, and men may change the names by which they excuse themselves until they believe the thing itself hath changed. Yet the old matter remains beneath the new dress. Mercy is not made better because it is modern, nor love because it is practised beneath electric light.
For this reason I have never been persuaded by those who say that mankind is advancing, nor by those who say that it is falling away. Particular things may improve, and others may plainly become worse, but the whole account is not ours to see. Every age knows something of the blindness of the age before it and very little of its own. Moral blindness is itself among the fundamentals; what changes is only the thing before which the blindness stands.
Neither do I know what is meant when men speak with confidence of an age entire. What was the eighteenth century? We may describe it, and perhaps describe it well, but the description is not the thing. Every cruelty unrecorded because ordinary, every kindness forgotten because obscure, belonged to that century as fully as any war or king by which we now remember it. Of such things we preserve fragments, and from the fragments make history, until at last the history comes to stand where the vanished thing once was.
The act and the reference are not one substance. A thing happens once in its fullness, and afterward must pass through memory and language, where something is always lost because to tell is already to select. There is but one Grand Recorder, and only He can know an age entire.
I have sometimes tried to imagine an entire symphony heard instantaneously rather than sequentially, the whole work present at once, no movement passing away before another may begin. The thought is impossible to the mind that conceives it, for we are creatures of temporal order. Yet some such hearing would be required before we could speak with certainty of the moral sum of history. We hear what is given to us measure by measure and then presume to judge the symphony.
This does not make judgment impossible. A wrong remains wrong though we cannot weigh the age which permitted it, and beauty remains beautiful though the age which produced it was not wholly good. What is denied us is the final reckoning by which all the hidden weight of mankind is gathered together and history declared to have risen or declined. Such books are not kept by us.
The adornments, above these unchanging fundamentals, matter greatly. They do not alter the permanent creature, but they form the world through which he must pass. Man cannot make himself anew; but he may build about him a world which turns him toward the Almighty, or one which leads him away.
The highest works of civilization have often been works of remembrance. A church does not remove pride, but may make pride conscious of its own smallness. Great music does not remove sorrow, but may place sorrow beneath a greater heaven. Such things arose from a world in which the sacred was not some private concern, but belonged to the order by which life itself was understood.
From such a world came Bruckner and Dante, Michelangelo and the great churches. Their works were not secular things upon which religion had afterward been painted. They came from a civilization in which God had not yet been removed from the structure of reality.
The forms may remain after the belief which made them hath grown faint. The stones may stand and the music continue to sound. But inheritance is not generation. Those who would preserve the majesty and dismiss the Almighty mistake the vessel for the source of what once filled it.
The greater danger is not that men continue to sin, for this is not new, but that they lose the language by which sin may be known. There is a great difference between the man who breaks a law he still believes to be true and the age which labours to make the law itself unintelligible. The first may yet repent. The second begins by making repentance absurd.
Human weakness remains. Unbelief creates no new creature; it only changes the signs hung around the old one. Man still seeks a center after he hath denied that any center exists, and because he cannot cease from turning toward something, he turns toward lesser things and gives them a weight they cannot bear.
Perhaps herein lies one meaning of The Way. It is not an escape from ordinary life, nor the setting apart of certain hours for God while the remainder is surrendered to spiritual vacancy. It is the ordering of the whole passage toward its proper end. No civilization can abolish the adversary by its own contrivance, nor should it seek to abolish the agency by which man must turn; but it may still build a world which makes the upward way visible and does not teach the creature to forget that there is an upward way at all.
Civilization cannot save man, nor can it alter the creature beneath his adornments. Yet the adornments are not therefore nothing. They may obscure the heavens or remind him that the heavens are there. They may teach him that he is sufficient unto himself, or they may show him the vanity of that thought.
And if among the things he builds there remain some which cause him to look upward, then perhaps they have performed their highest office; for though they cannot alter the permanent creature, they may still remind him what he is, Whose world he inhabits, and toward Whom he was always meant to turn.