Any standard illustrator could give us Verne or Bellamy or Wells if he
did his best. _But we want pictures beyond the skill of any delineator in
the old mediums, yet within the power of the wizard photoplay producer_.
Oh you who are coming to-morrow, show us everyday America as it will be
when we are only halfway to the millennium yet thousands of years in the
future! Tell what type of honors men will covet, what property they will
still be apt to steal, what murders they will commit, what the law court
and the jail will be or what will be the substitutes, how the newspaper
will appear, the office, the busy street.
Picture to America the lovers in her half-millennium, when usage shall
have become iron-handed once again, when noble sweethearts must break
beautiful customs for the sake of their dreams. Show us the gantlet of
strange courtliness they must pass through before they reach one another,
obstacles brought about by the immemorial distinctions of scholarship
gowns or service badges.
Make a picture of a world where machinery is so highly developed it
utterly disappeared long ago. Show us the antique United States, with ivy
vines upon the popular socialist churches, and weather-beaten images of
socialist saints in the niches of the doors. Show us the battered
fountains, the brooding universities, the dusty libraries. Show us houses
of administration with statues of heroes in front of them and gentle
banners flowing from their pinnacles. Then paint pictures of the oldest
trees of the time, and tree-revering ceremonies, with unique costumes and
a special priesthood.
Show us the marriage procession, the christening, the consecration of the
boy and girl to the state. Show us the political processions and election
riots. Show us the people with their graceful games, their religious
pantomimes. Show us impartially the memorial scenes to celebrate the
great men and women, and the funerals of the poor. And then moving on
toward the millennium itself, show America after her victories have been
won, and she has grown old, as old as the Sphinx. Then give us the Dragon
and Armageddon and the Lake of Fire.
Author-producer-photographer, who would prophesy, read the last book in
the Bible, not to copy it in form and color, but that its power and grace
and terror may enter into you. Delineate in your own way, as you are led
on your own Patmos, the picture of our land redeemed. After fasting and
prayer, let the Spirit conduct you till you see in definite line and form
the throngs of the brotherhood of man, the colonnades where the arts are
expounded, the gardens where the children dance.
That which man desires, that will man become. He largely fulfils his own
prediction and vision. Let him therefore have a care how he prophesies
and prays. We shall have a tin heaven and a tin earth, if the scientists
are allowed exclusive command of our highest hours.
Let us turn to Luke iv. 17.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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