The deep and abiding traditions of religion belong to the countryside. For it is there that man earns his daily bread by submitting to superhuman forces whose behavior he can only partially control. There is not much he can do when he has ploughed the ground and planted his seed except to wait hopefully for sun and rain from the sky. He is obviously part of a scheme that is greater than himself, subject to elements that transcend his powers and surpass his understanding. The city is an acid that dissolves [p063] this piety. How different it is from an ancient vineyard where men cultivate what their fathers have planted. In a modern city it is not easy to maintain that “reverent attachment to the sources of his being and the steadying of his life by that attachment.” It is not natural to form reverent attachments to an apartment on a two-year lease, and an imitation mahogany desk on the thirty-second floor of an office building. In such an environment piety becomes absurd, a butt for the facetious, and the pious man looks like a picturesque yokel or a stuffy fool. Yet without piety, without a patriotism of family and place, without an almost plant-like implication in unchangeable surroundings, there can be no disposition to believe in an external order of things. The omnipotence of God means something to men who submit daily to the cycles of the weather and the mysterious power of nature. But the city man puts his faith in furnaces to keep out the cold, is proudly aware of what bad sewage his ancestors endured, and of how ignorantly they believed that God, who made Adam at 9 A.M. on October 23 in the year 4004 B.C., was concerned with the behavior of Adam’s children. 4. _Sophisticated Violence_ Much effort goes into finding substitutes for this radical loss of association. There is the Americanization movement, for example, which in some of its public manifestations has as much resemblance to patriotism as the rape of the Sabine women had to the love of Dante for Beatrice. There is the vociferous nationalism of the [p064] hundred percenters which is always most eloquent when it is about to be most rowdy. There are the anxious outcries of the sectarians who in their efforts to revive the religion of their fathers show the utmost contempt for the aspirations of their sons. There is Mr. Henry Ford hastily collecting American antiques before his cars destroy the whole culture which produced them. There is Mr. Lothrop Stoddard looking every man in the eye to see whether it is Nordic blue. There are a thousand and one patently artificial, sometimes earnest, often fantastic fundamentalist agitations. They are all attempts to impose quickly by one kind of sophisticated violence or another a posture of faith which can be genuine only when it belongs to the unquestioned memories of the soul. They are a shrill insistence that men ought to feel that which no man can feel who does not already feel it in the marrow of his bones.