Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
The facilities for finding out what the ninety million people would do
and say, and what they would want, the general conveniences for assuring
the two men on the sidewalk that they will be able to conduct their
bargain, and to get the other ninety million in, accurately, that they
will be able to do by them as they would be done by--these have scarcely
been arranged for yet.
In our machine age, with our railroads, and our telephones suddenly
heaping our lives up on one another's lives, almost before we have
noticed it, our religious machinery to go with our other machinery, our
machinery that we are going to be Christians with, has not been
invented yet.
Religion two-men size, or man and woman size, or one family or two
family size or village size has been worked out. Religion as long as it
has been concerned with a few people and was a matter of love between
neighbours, or of skill in being neighbourly, has had no special or
imperative need for science or the scientific man.
Now that religion is obliged to be an intimate, a confiding relation
between ninety million people, the spiritual genius, devotion, and
holiness of the scientific man, of the man who says "how" has come to be
the modern man's almost only access to his God.
A ninety million man-power religion is an enterprise of spiritual
engineering, a feat in national and international statesmanship, a
gigantic structural constructive achievement in human nature. Doing as
one would be done by, with a few people, is a thing that any man can sit
down and read his Bible a few minutes and arrange for himself. He can
manage to do as he would be done by, fairly well in the next yard. But
how about doing as one would be done by with ninety million people--all
sizes, all climates, all religions, Buffalo, New Orleans, Seattle? How
about doing as one would be done by three thousand miles?
It is an understatement to say, as we look about our modern world, that
Christianity has not been tried yet.
Christianity has not been invented yet.
What was invented two thousand years ago was the spirit of Christianity.
Christianity has been for two thousand years a spirit.
It is almost like a new religion to me just of itself to think of it. It
is like being presented suddenly with a new world to think of it, to
think that all we have really done with Christianity as yet is to use it
as a breath or spirit.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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