This would seem, then, to wipe out also any knowledge of absolute values.  Christian theism has interpreted God largely in static, final terms.  The craving for the absolute in the human mind, as witnessed by the long course of the history of thought, as pathetically witnessed to in the mixture of chicanery, fanaticism and insight of the modern mystical and occult healing sects, is central and immeasurable.  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.  In the early days of the labor movement William Morris wrote, “we have become slaves of the monster to which invention has given birth.”  In 1853, shortly after the introduction of the cotton gin into India, the Viceroy wrote:  “The misery is scarcely paralleled in the history of trade.” (A large statement that!) “The bones of the cotton workers whiten the plains of India.”

But the temporary suffering caused by the immediate crowding out of cottage industry and the abrupt increase in production was insignificant beside the deeper influence, physical, moral, mental, of the machine in changing the permanent habitat and the entire mode of living for millions of human beings.  It removed them from those healthy rural surroundings which preserve the half-primitive, half-poetic insight into the nature of things which comes from relative isolation and close contact with the soil, to the nervous tension, the amoral conditions, the airless, lightless ugliness of the early factory settlements.  Here living conditions were not merely beastly; they were often bestial.  The economic helplessness of the factory hands reduced them to essential slavery.  They