1. Reidenbach, Clarence, “The Future's Broadening Way,” The Congregation. alist and Herald of Gospel Liberty, Vol. 116 (01 1, 1931), p. 3.Google Scholar This journal is the ancestor of the later Advance and the present United Church Herald. (These successive changes of title may have a subtle bearing on the subject of the present paper.)

2. Bury, J. B., The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into its Growth and Origin. (New York, [1932] 1955), p. 2.Google Scholar

3. Louis L. Wilson, Cornell College '29, in The Intercollegian, quoted in The Churchman, Vol. 145 (01 16, 1932), p. 18.Google Scholar

4. The Christian Century, Vol. 48 (09 16, 1931), pp. 1134f.Google Scholar

5. Dodson, George B., “Humanity's Corning of Age,” quoted in The Christian Register, Vol. 112 (06 22, 1933), p. 402.Google Scholar

6. Beaven, Albert W., quoted in The Congregationalist …, Vol. 118 (12 28, 1933), p. 1186.Google Scholar

7. Bradley, Dwight, “What's Coming in Protestantism,” The Christian Century, Vol. 49 (01 6, 1932), p. 13.Google Scholar

8. J. B. Bury, op. cit., p. 352.

9. This vogue is discussed in Hughes, H. Stuart, Oswald Spengler: a Critical Estimate (New York, 1952)Google Scholar Chap. 6.

10. Erutch, Joseph Wood, The Modern Temper: a Study and a Confession (New York, 1929)Google Scholar, Chap. 8. This work was re-published in 1956 with a new preface in which Mr. Kruteh announced a substantial modification of his views, and in a more optimistic direction; nevertheless, he declared that “the downfall of our civilization sometimes seems to be approaching faster than I thought it would [in 1929].” Ibid., 1956 edition (in paper), p. xi.

11. KersKner, Frederick D., “Realities and Visions” (third article in the series “How My Mind has Changed in This Decade”), The Christian Century, Vol. 56 (02 1, 1939), pp. 148ff.Google Scholar

12. Hofstndter, Richard, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York, 1955), p. 278.Google Scholar

13. Handy, Robert T., “The American Religious Depression, 1925–1935,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, Vol. 29 (03, 1960), pp. 3ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar (Presidential address to the American Society of Church History, Chicago, December 29, 1959).

14. Horton, Douglas, Foreword to Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man, (New York, [1928] 1957), pp. 2, 3, 6.Google Scholar

15. Hume, Theodore C., reviewing Moral Man and Immoral Society, in The Christian Century, Vol. 50 (01 4, 1933), p. 18.Google Scholar

16. Clarence Reidenbach, op. cit., italics supplied.

17. Living Church, Vol. 85 (08 22, 1931), p. 547.Google Scholar

18. Newton, Joseph Fort, “Is the World Growing Better” The Churchman, Vol. 145 (01. 16, 1932), pp. 10f.Google Scholar

19. Horton, Walter M., chapter on “The United States” in Henry, Smith Leiper, ed., Christianity Today: a Survey of the State of the Churches (New York, 1947), p. 400.Google Scholar

20. The Christian Century, Vol. 51, 03 7, 1934, p. 323.Google Scholar Morrison qualified his approval somewhat: “I do not think Niebuhr is fair to liberalism.” Ibid., p. 324.

21. Niebuhr, Reinhold, Reflections on the End of an Era (New York, 1934), p. 23.Google Scholar

22. Some of the reviewers thought that this was the kind of prophecy Niebuhr was making, and so missed his point; e.g., “his plea is for a new régime of social ownership and justice for the disinherited,” the implication being that he is therefore “advanced” (i.e., progressive) in his political and economic ideas (Forum, Vol. 92, 07, 1934, p.v).Google Scholar Cf.Barnes, Harry Elmer in the American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 40 (11 1934), p. 404Google Scholar; though Barnes damned Niebuhr's “intellectual fog and theological conservatism,” he praised his “social progressiveness.”

23. Reinhold Niebuhr, op. cit., pp. 80, 195, 244.

24. Odell Shepard in the New York Times, March 25, 1934; nevertheless he likened Niebuhr to Spengler, and called the book “not cheery reading.”

25. R. Niebuhr, op. cit., pp. 281, 280, 290, 294, 286ff., 281.

26. Ronayne, Charles F. in the American Review (formerly Bookman), Vol. 2 (03, 1934), pp. 619f.Google Scholar

27. Ranch, Basil, ed., Franklin D. Roosevelt: Selected Speeches, Messages, Press Conferences, and Letters (New York, 1957), p. 155.Google Scholar The context makes the point even more vividly: “Markets hum with bustling movement, banks are secure; ships and trains are running full. Once again it is a Chicago that smiles. And with Chicago, a whole nation…,” (etc.).

28. Meyer, Donald B., The Protestant Search for Political Realism, 1919–1941 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1960), p. 269.Google Scholar This author's whole discussion of the New Deal, at. pp. 261ff., will repay careful reading; it revises, extends, and to some degree supersedes the chapter titled “Impact: the Hundred Days and Afterward,” in my own study of the Social Gospel during those years (The Decline and Revival of the Social Gospel [Ithaca, 1956]).Google Scholar

29. Excerpts from this address appeared in Advance, Vol. 134 (01, 1942), p. 8.Google Scholar Cf. the very similar argument set forth by Joseph Fort Newton in 1932, note 18, supra.

30. The text of this Declaration was published in Ibid., September, 1942, p. 395.

31. Ibid., December, 1942, p. 546.

32. On obliteration bombing, see editorial “The Leveling of Tokyo,” The Christian Century, Vol. 62 (06 6, 1945), p. 667Google Scholar; on what would now be called “genocide,” Ibid., April 25, p. 509, under title “Now McNutt is for extermination”; on Japanese bones as American souvenirs, the article “Kagawa on the Radio,” Ibid., June 6, p. 670. This last was a comment on a photograph which was alleged to have appeared in Life “last August” (i.e., 1944). Careful search of the files of Life for the months of July, August, and September failed to disclose any such photograph; but although the Century staff may have been wrong in detail, they were correct in depiction of a national mood. Any veteran of the Pacific War can attest, if he will, that equally outrageous things were in fact done by Americans to Japanese, although this is still sometimes rationalized as a response to the latter's “fanaticism.” (Just as Hiroshima is still, in some quarters, viewed as a “trade” for Pearl Harbor.) But American mistreatment of the American Indian used to be justified in the same way.

33. Advance, Vol. 136 (12, 1944), p. 3.Google Scholar

34. Basil Rauch, op. cit., p. 391. Ranch notes that the President “added the final sentence in his own handwriting” on the typescript. Ibid., p. 389; accordingly we may, I think, take this as FDR's last testament on the subject of Progress.

35. “Has Western Civilization Been Done to Death¶”, The Christian Century, Vol. 62 (06 20, 1945), p. 725.Google Scholar

36. Time, 09 10, 1945, p. 74.Google Scholar

37. Christianity and Crisis, Vol. 5 (09 17, 1945), pp. 5, 7.Google Scholar The lead editorial in the same issue of this journal, entitled “Japan's Surrender,” dealt similarly with the celebrations of V-J Day: “We lived for a few hours in an illusion of peace attained.” Ibid., p. 2.

38. Horton, Walter M., chapter on “The United States” in Leiper, Henry Smith, ed., Christianity Today (previously cited)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, loc. cit.

39. It is an error, in my opinion, to view H. G. Wells as always having been an optimist. Alongside his progressivism there had now and again appeared flashes of apocalyptic terror, most notably in some of his science-fiction. The Time Machine, for example, which was first published before the turn of the century, forecasts an end for Majn as grisly as any of the anti-Utopias of the Huxley/Orwell school. For the same reason, it is unfair to dismiss Wells's last book, as some have, as being simply a garrulous old man's senile fears. The book has powerfully influenced too many younger men, most notably Cohn Wilson, for that.

40. Wells, H. G., Mind at the End of its Tether, pp. 18, 3, 17.Google Scholar

41. Niebuhr, Reinhold, Faith and History: a Comparison of Christian and Modern Views of History (New York: Scribner's, [1949] 1951), p. 163.Google Scholar But of. my qualification, note 39, supra.

42. H. G. Wells, op. cit., p. 15.

43. Fox, F. Earle, “The Way of the Cross among Nations,” The Christian Century, Vol. 79 (04 18, 1962), p. 484.Google Scholar

44. Löwith, Karl, Meaning in History (Chicago, [1949] 1957), pp. 3, v, vi.Google Scholar

45. Ibid., pp. 196, 197.

46. New York Times Book Review, 08 28, 1949, p. 17.Google Scholar

47. Latourette, Kenneth S., Niebuhr, Reinhold, Stoeffler, F. Ernest, “‘Christ the Hope of the World’: What Has History to Say¶”, Religion in Life, Vol. 23 (Summer, 1954), p. 332.Google Scholar

48. Ibid., pp. 348f.

49. Toynbee, Arnold J., A Study of History, abridgement of Volumes I-VI by Somervell, D. C. (New York and London, 1947), pp. 49f.Google ScholarCf. the fuller description of the cliff-metaphor in the unabridged original, Vol. I (London, 1934), pp. 192ff.

50. Ibid. (Somervell abridgement), p. 254.

51. Sidney Hook (and others), “The New Failure of Nerve,” Partisan Review. Vol. 10 (01–02, 1943), pp. 2ff.Google Scholar

52. Harry Elmer Barnes, reviewing Toynbee, , Civilization on Trial, in The American. Sociological Review, Vol. 13 (08, 1948), p. 494.Google Scholar

53. E.g., Toynbee, op. cit., p. 487: “Unquestionably Catholicism is the form of Western Christianity that is showing the most vigorous signs of life today.” And cf. his discussions of the Papacy and the Reformation generally.

54. Mr. Toynbee came to New York to help launch Volumes VII through X before their American audience in the fall of 1954. While there, he visited Union Theological Seminary, and lectured to a remarkably hostile audience of seminary students; their anger seemed to me about equally composed of disappointment that he had not turned out to be a Christian (he called himself “Christians-Buddhist” on that occasion) and pique that they had allowed themselves to be persuaded that he would. I thought Mr. Toynbee conducted himself with becoming modesty and charity, under the circumstances.

55. This remarkable experiment in universal liturgies may be found in Volume X of the Study (London, New York, and Toronto, 1954), pp. 143f.Google Scholar As a British satirist was to observe of Mr. Toynbee's theology: “Before the 1939 war he was quite sound (strict C of E [Church of England] and all that), but after it—Oh My!” “Myra Buttle,” pseud., Toynbee in Elysium (New York, 1959), p. 6.Google Scholar

56. J. B. Bury, op. cit., p. 276.

57. Toynbee, Arnold J., Civilization on Trial (New York, 1948), p. 235Google Scholar Cf. his article “Churches and Civilizations” in the Yale Review, Vol. 37 (new series) (09, 1947), p. 7Google Scholar: “Religious enlightenment is apt to be learnt through suffering … and … in the life of societies, the form of suffering through which the deepest spiritual lessons are learnt is the breakdown and disintegration of a civilization.” This was also the article in which he called modern Western civilization “an unfortunate, and even disastrous, aberration.”

58. Ibid., Vol. 38 (new series) (Autumn, 1948), p. 142.

59. Text of address, in translation from the Latin, in the New York Times, 10 12, 1962, p. 18.Google Scholar I am indebted to my wife for calling my attention to this passage in the Pope's address, and for pointing out its relevance to the subject of the present paper.

60. Schlink, Edmund, “Christ—the Hope of the World,” text in The Christian Century, Vol. 71 (08 25, 1954. p. 1002.Google Scholar Another of the opening addresses to the Assembly, by Robert L. Calhoun, followed. Perhaps a bit less apocalyptic than his colleague, Calhoun nevertheless noted that “death … armed at this moment with terrible new weapons … stands across the path of every human person and people,” and warned: “Whatever can be achieved in earthly history … a hope that can rightly triumph over such hydra-headed perils must envisage in some sense ‘a. new heaven and a new earth.’” (In short, it would have to be “providential” rather than “progressive.”) Ibid., p. 1011. The literature surrounding the theme of Evanston abounds Lu such examples— and in oceasional dissent. Cf. Walter H. Riley, “Hope in God and Man,” Ibid., August18, 1954, pp. 970f.

61. Konrad, N. I., “Notes on the Meaning of History,” Vestnik lstorii Mirovoi Kul'tury (Journal of the History of World Culture), 1961, no. 2;Google Scholar in Soviet Studies in History: Selected Articles from Soviet Journals in English Translation, Vol. 1 (Summer, 1962), pp. 7, 20, 21.Google Scholar

62. Ibid., p. 22.

63. Niebuhr, Reinhold, The Self and the Dramas of History (New York, 1955), p. 216.Google Scholar

64. N. I. Konrad, op. cit., p. 7.

65. Niebuhr, , Faith and History, p. viii.Google Scholar