Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
And when I find myself myself, I, who have gloried in cathedrals since I
was a little child, looking ahead for a God upon the earth, and when I
see the foundries, the airships, the ocean liners beckoning the soul of
man upon the skies, and the victory of the soul over the dust and over
the water and over the air and when I see the Cathedrals beside them,
those vast, faint, grave, happy, floating islands of the Saved, drifting
backward down the years, it does not seem as if I could bear the
foundries saying one thing about my God and the cathedrals saying
another.
I have tried to see a way out. Why should it be so?
I have seen that the foundries, the ocean liners, and the airships are
in the hands of men who say How.
Perhaps we will take goodness and cathedrals, very soon now, and put
them for a while in the hands of the men who say how. If St. Francis,
for instance, to-day, were to be suddenly more like Bessemer, or if Dr.
Henry Van Dyke were more like Edison or if the Reverend R.J. Campbell
were more like Sir Joseph Lister or if the Bishop of London were to go
at London the way Marconi goes at the sky, what would begin to happen to
goodness? One likes to imagine what would happen if that same spirit,
the spirit of "how" were brought to bear upon a great engineering
enterprise like goodness in this world.
Perhaps the spirit of "how" is the spirit of God.
Perhaps religion in the twentieth century is Technique.
Technique in the twentieth century is the Holy Ghost.
Technique is the very last thing that has been thought of in religion.
Religion is being converted before our eyes. It is becoming touched with
the temper of science, with the thoroughness, the doggedness, the
inconsolableness of science until it is seeing how and until it is
saying how.
When the inventors, in our machine age, get to work on goodness in the
way that they are getting to work on other things, things will begin to
happen to goodness that the vague, sweet saints of two thousand years
have never dreamed of yet.
In London and New York, in this first quarter of the twentieth century
Christianity will not be put off as a spirit. The right of Christianity
to be a spirit has lapsed.
Christianity is a Method.
What Christ meant when He said He was the Truth and the Life, has been
understood, on the whole, very well. What He meant by saying He was the
Way, we are now beginning, to work out.
* * * * *
A thousand or two years ago, when two men stood by the roadside and made
a bargain, it was their affair.
When two men stand on the sidewalk now and make a bargain, say in New
York, they have to deal and to deal very thoughtfully and accurately
with ninety million people who are not there. They do this as well as
they can by imagining what the ninety million people would do and say,
and how they would like to be done by, if they were there.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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