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There is one factor, however, which is especially characteristic of the age—the idea of meliorism. Meliorism is “a belief in the possibility of the improvement of the world by human effort, generally implying the further belief that such progressive improvement is a fact and even a law of evolution.” Meliorism is the “happy mean” between radical optimism and radical pessimism—between the idea that all that is, is good, and that which holds that all that is, is bad. Sully defines it as: “The faith which affirms not merely our power of lessening evil—this nobody questions—but also our ability to increase the amount of positive good. By recognizing the possibility of happiness and the ability of each individual to do something to increase the sum total of human welfare present and future, meliorism gives us a practical creed sufficient to inspire ardent and prolonged endeavor.” Fraser says: “Faith in a gradual abatement of evil by the method of progressive evolution is now a favorite scientific faith; this faith may be regarded as the form which an unconsciously religious conception of the universe is assuming in professedly agnostic minds.” Carus says of this spirit: “The new world-conception, animated by the spirit of science, shows itself in the changes that are wrought not only in our views of the importance of science, but also in practical affairs, in the nature and administration of justice, in the education of children, in our judgment concerning social as well as international affairs, in the way we consider the occurrence of great disasters, such as earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, and in many other things. The spirit of the Middle Ages, with its penal code of barbaric punishments, its cruelty in pedagogy, its narrowness in nationalism and religion, retreats step by step, while truer and broader views that are being more and more universally recognized, herald the advent of an age of science.”

As a straw showing which way the philosophical and metaphysical wind is blowing in this first decade of the twentieth century, and as an instance of the recognition of the situation by the orthodox authorities, I call your attention to the following quotation from the leading editorial appearing in The Interior , of Chicago, in its issue of August 26, 1909. Coming as this does from the editorial pages of this well-known religious journal, the statement is of remarkable interest to those who are familiar with the modern trend of thought, and particularly in its evident tendency toward the old pantheistic conceptions. The editorial says:

WHAT PREJUDICES MODERN PHILOSOPHY AGAINST A PERSONAL GOD.

“Contemporary philosophers generally assume that it has become impossible in the present age to think of God as a person. Nobody nowadays is an atheist; everybody insists that he believes in God. But if he has aspirations to be recognized as of the guild of the philosophers, he hastens to add that though he believes in God, he does not believe in a God. He conceives God as impersonal—the great cause pervading the universe.

“Should anyone in the face of this persist in teaching that God is an individual being, with faculties of consciousness, emotion and will, these philosophers by that token rate him no thinker.

“Plain men naturally wonder what it is that the philosophers have found out new to make them so sure God is not individual.

“This answer may not be philosophic, but it is believed fair:

“The present swing to pantheism is not because thinkers have discovered any new facts or developed any new logic which makes personality in God incredible, but because the doctrine of monism is the prevailing creed in metaphysics to-day and pantheism goes easily with that.

“But answering after this fashion manifestly throws back the inquirer to another question—why do modern philosophers so unanimously take to monism?—and that answer is not easy.

“The monist, of course, says he believes in monism because it is true—that nothing else rationally explains existence. And the modern monist is as dogmatic about it as ever the old-time Calvinist was about his five-pointed creed; when you hear the withering scorn with which he speaks of ‘the exploded dualistic conception of the universe,’ you feel that they must have been poor fools indeed who ever ventured to hold that idea.

“The fact is, however, that the issues at stake between monistic philosophy and opposing propositions are questions that men have been thinking of ever since they thought at all about the kind of world they were living in; and the pendulum of speculation has first swung toward the monistic idea and then away from it, leaving the puzzle of it all still unsettled.

“And although it seems brash to say it in the face of practically all the metaphysicians of the time, even one who knows he is very much of a non-metaphysician may venture the opinion that the present ascendancy of monism is just another swing of the pendulum, which settles nothing, but is presently to be succeeded by an opposite aspect of philosophy.

“At least, the appearance of Professor William James as a pluralist suggests that monism is not just sure of permanence.

“The doctrine of monism is that all the universe is just one thing— one reality—one substance—and that all the different things men see are merely phenomena of the one universal thing. Whence it is easy to proceed to calling that one thing God—which is pantheism.

“Monism doesn’t have to teach divine impersonality, however, for if a monist holds that the one unifying reality which composes the universe is Mind, then it is at least philosophically possible to conceive that Mind as possessing consciousness, reason, purpose, love and all the other attributes of personality.

“But the general fact is, that if monism does not require an impersonal Deity necessarily, it arrives there very readily indeed.

“As long, therefore, as monism persists, the plain man need not be surprised to hear a great deal of pantheistic talk among those to whom metaphysics is a more vivid subject than life.”

The writer of the above editorial is right when he gives to the general scientific philosophical thought the credit for having turned men’s minds in the direction of monism, the doctrine of which he correctly states as, “that all of the universe is just one thing—one reality—one substance—and that all the different things men see are merely phenomena of the one universal thing.” But is he likewise right in his conclusion that when that conception is once held in the mind, “it is at least philosophically possible to conceive that mind as possessing consciousness, reason, purpose, love, and all the other attributes of personality ”? Is there not a vast difference between an absolute principle and a relative personality!

Another straw is seen in the popularity of poems bringing out the idea of the Oneness of All, as, for instance, the following:

ILLUSION

By Ella Wheeler Wilcox

God and I in space alone,

And nobody else in view.

And “Where are the people, O Lord,” I said,

“The earth below and the sky o’erhead,

And the dead whom once I knew?”

“That was a dream,” God smiled and said;

“A dream that seemed to be true;

There were no people living or dead,

There was no earth and no sky o’erhead,

There was only Myself and you.”

“Why do I feel no fear,” I asked,

“Meeting you here in this way?

For I have sinned, I know full well;

And is there heaven, and is there hell,

And is this the judgment day?”

“Nay! those were dreams,” the great God said,

“Dreams that have ceased to be;

There is no such thing as fear, or sin;

There is no YOU—you never have been—