All this is not absolute but relative. It represents the physical side of life. The age of science and commercialism is here. There is no sound reason for wishing it otherwise. The wise desire is not to destroy it, but to use it and direct it rather than to be used and directed by it, that it may be as it should be, not the master but the servant , That that the physical forces may not prevail over the moral forces and that the rule of life may not be expediency but righteousness.
Modern civilization dates from Greece and Rome.
The world was not new in their day. They were the inheritors of a civilization which had gone before, but what they had inherited they recast e , enlarged and intensified and made their own, so that their culture took on a distinctive form, all of which was combined in the Roman world of the Ceasers. Caesars it embraced all that the last held best. That great Empire fell a prey, first to itself and then to the barbarians. After this seeming catastrophe learning scholarships and culture almost disappeared for nearly a thousand years, finally to emerg y e again in the revival of learning.