me that in both cases the revolt and the decadence are due to that fierce, short creed of rebellion against humane no less than religious standards, which has more and more governed our national economic systems and our international political intercourse.  Let me begin with business and industry as they existed before the war.  I paint a general picture; there are many and notable exceptions to it, human idealism there is in plenty, but it and they only prove the rule.  And as I paint the picture, ask yourselves the two questions which should interest us as preachers regarding it.  First, by which of these three laws of human development, religious, humanistic, naturalistic, has it been largely governed?  Secondly, by what law are men now attempting to solve its present difficulties?

The present industrial situation is the product of two causes.  One of them was the invention of machinery and the discovery of steam transit.  These multiplied production.  They made accessible unexploited sources of raw material and new markets for finished goods.  The opportunities for lucrative trading and the profitableness of overproduction which they made possible became almost immeasurable.  Before these discoveries western society was generally agricultural, accompanied by cottage industries and guild trades.  It was largely made up of direct contacts and controlled by local interests.  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!