Yes, oh, yes, I am not overlooking the “steady progress from age to age of the coming of the kingdom of God and righteousness.”  “From age to age”—­yes, it describes that giddy gait.  I (and the rocks) will not live to see it arrive, but that is all right—­it will arrive, it surely will.  But you ought not to be always ironically apologizing for the Deity.  If that thing is going to arrive, it is inferable that He wants it to arrive; and so it is not quite kind of you, and it hurts me, to see you flinging sarcasms at the gait of it.  And yet it would not be fair in me not to admit that the sarcasms are deserved.  When the Deity wants a thing, and after working at it for “ages and ages” can’t show even a shade of progress toward its accomplishment, we—­well, we don’t laugh, but it is only because we dasn’t.  The source of “righteousness”—­is in the heart?  Yes.  And engineered and directed by the brain?  Yes.  Well, history and tradition testify that the heart is just about what it was in the beginning; it has undergone no shade of change.  Its good and evil impulses and their consequences are the same today that they were in Old Bible times, in Egyptian times, in Greek times, in Middle Age times, in Twentieth Century times.  There has been no change.

Meantime, the brain has undergone no change.  It is what it always was.  There are a few good brains and a multitude of poor ones.  It was so in Old Bible times and in all other times—­Greek, Roman, Middle Ages and Twentieth Century.  Among the savages—­all the savages—­the average brain is as competent as the average brain here or elsewhere.  I will prove it to you, some time, if you like.  And there are great brains among them, too.  I will prove that also, if you like.

Well, the 19th century made progress—­the first progress after “ages and ages”—­colossal progress.  In what?  Materialities.  Prodigious acquisitions were made in things which add to the comfort of many and make life harder for as many more.  But the addition to righteousness?  Is that discoverable?  I think not.  The materialities were not invented in the interest of righteousness; that there is more righteousness in the world because of them than there, was before, is hardly demonstrable, I think.  In Europe and America, there is a vast change (due to them) in ideals—­do you admire it?  All Europe and all America, are feverishly scrambling for money.  Money is the supreme ideal—­all others take tenth place with the great bulk of the nations named.  Money-lust has always existed, but not in the history of the world was it ever a craze, a madness, until your time and mine.  This lust has rotted these nations; it has made them hard, sordid, ungentle, dishonest, oppressive.

Did England rise against the infamy of the Boer war?  No—­rose in favor of it.  Did America rise against the infamy of the Phillipine war?  No —­rose in favor of it.  Did Russia rise against the infamy of the present war?  No—­sat still and said nothing.  Has the Kingdom of God advanced in Russia since the beginning of time?