Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
There is the man who is so tired, or mechanical-minded, that he can only
think of himself.
There is the man who is so tired that he can only think of his class.
And there is the man that one has watched being moved over slowly from a
Me-man into a Class-man, who has begun to show the first faint
beginnings of being a Crowd-man.
One man has courage for himself because he knows what he wants for
himself. Another has courage for his class because he knows what he
wants for his class. Another has courage for God and for the world
because there are things he sees that he wants for God and for the
world, and he sees them so clearly that he sees ways to get them.
Lack of courage is a lack of vision or clear-headedness about what one
wants. I do not know, but I can only say that it has seemed to me that
Bishop Gore has a vision or clear-headedness about what he wants for
democracy, and that he uses his vision of what he wants for democracy to
true his vision for his class. Perhaps also he has a vision for his
class for the church people that it is for the interest church people to
be the class that is, out of all the world, supremely considerate, big,
leisurely, unfretful in its dealings with others. Perhaps also he has a
vision for himself and is clear-headed for himself, and has seen that
though the steeples fall about him, and though the altars go up in
smoke, he will keep the spirit of God still within his reach. The
gentleness, the grim hope for the world and the patience that built the
cathedrals, shall be in his heart day and night.
I hold no brief for Bishop Gore.
I know there must be others like him who voted on the other side.
I know there are hundreds of thousands of employers who in their hearts
are like him. I know there are hundreds of thousands of men in the
trades unions who are like him.
I am not sure that Bishop Gore, on the merits of the case, was right. I
wish this day I knew that he was wrong. I wish that I had spent the last
six months in fighting him, in fighting against his vision, that I might
be more free to-day to point to him with joy when I go up and down the
streets with men and look at the churches with men--the rows of
churches--and try to tell them what they are for. I have seen that the
cathedrals scattered about under the sky in England are but God's little
tools to make great cities on the earth, and to build softly out of the
hearts of men and women men who shall be cathedrals too--men buttressed
against the world, men who can stand alone.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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