Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
I look at the vision of the earth to-day, of the great cities rushing
together at last and running around the world like children running
around a house--great cities shouting on the seas, suddenly sliding up
and down the globe, playing hopscotch on the equator, scrambling up the
poles--all these colossal children!... Here we all are!--a whiff of
steam from the Watts's steam kettle and a wave of Marconi across the air
and we have crept up from our little separate sunsets, all our little
private national bedrooms of light and darkness into the one single same
cunning dooryard of a world! Our religion, our politics, our Bibles,
kings, millionaires, crowds, bombs, prophets and railroads all hurling,
sweeping, crashing our lives together in a kind of vast international
collision of intimacy.
All the Christianity we can bring to bear or that we can use to run this
crash of intimacy with is a spirit, a breath.
We do not well to berate one another or to berate one another's motives
or to assail human nature or to grow satirical about God with all our
little battered helpless Christians about us and our unadjusted
religions.
We are a new human race grappling with a new world. Our Christianity has
not been invented yet and if we want a God, we will work like chemists,
like airmen, turn the inside of the earth out, dump the sky, move
mountains, face cities, love one another, and find Him!
In the meantime until we have done this, until we have worked as
chemists and airmen work, Christianity is a spirit.
It explains all this eager jumble of the world, brushes away our
objections, frees our hearts, gives us our program, makes us know what
we are for, to stop and think a moment of this--that Christianity is a
spirit.
Everything that is passing wonderful is a spirit at first. God begins
building a world as a world-spirit, out of a spirit brooding upon the
waters. Then for a long while the vague waters, then for a long while a
little vague land or spirit-of-planet before a real world.
And every real belief that man has had, has begun as a spirit.
For two thousand years Man has had the spirit of immortality. Homer had
it. Homer had moments when improvising his mighty song all alone, of
hearing or seeming to hear, faintly, choruses of men's voices singing
his songs after him, a thousand years away.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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