no man has seen since Adam. No unchanging custom, no changing
evolution can make the original good any thing but good.
Man may have had concubines as long as cows have had horns:
still they are not a part of him if they are sinful. Men may
have been under oppression ever since fish were under water;
still they ought not to be, if oppression is sinful. The chain may
seem as natural to the slave, or the paint to the harlot, as does
the plume to the bird or the burrow to the fox; still they are not,
if they are sinful. I lift my prehistoric legend to defy all
your history. Your vision is not merely a fixture: it is a fact."
I paused to note the new coincidence of Christianity: but I
passed on.

I passed on to the next necessity of any ideal of progress.
Some people (as we have said) seem to believe in an automatic
and impersonal progress in the nature of things. But it is clear
that no political activity can be encouraged by saying that progress
is natural and inevitable; that is not a reason for being active,
but rather a reason for being lazy. If we are bound to improve,
we need not trouble to improve. The pure doctrine of progress
is the best of all reasons for not being a progressive. But it
is to none of these obvious comments that I wish primarily to
call attention.

The only arresting point is this: that if we suppose
improvement to be natural, it must be fairly simple. The world
might conceivably be working towards one consummation, but hardly
towards any particular arrangement of many qualities. To take
our original simile: Nature by herself may be growing more blue;
that is, a process so simple that it might be impersonal. But Nature