The Voice of the Machines: An Introduction to the Twentieth Century — John Shaqi
The Voice of the Machines: An Introduction to the Twentieth CenturyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
The Voice of the Machines: An Introduction to the Twentieth Century
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Machinery
Symposiums on how to reach the masses are pitiless irony. There is no
need for symposiums. It is an open secret. It cries upon the
house-tops. It calls above the world in the Sabbath bells. A church
that believes less than the world believes shall lose its leadership
in the world. "Why should I pay pew rent," says the man who sings with
his hands, "to men who do not believe in me, to worship, with men who
do not believe in me, a God that does not believe in me?" If heaven
itself (represented as a rich and idle place,--seats free in the
evening) were opened to the true laboring man on the condition that he
should despise his hands by holding palms in them, he would find some
excuse for staying away. He feels in no wise different with regard to
his present life. "Unless your God," says the man who sings with his
hands, to those who pity him and do him good,--"unless your God is a
God I can worship in a factory, He is not a God I care to worship in a
church."
Behold it is written: The church that does not delight in these men
and in what these men are for, as much as the street delights in them,
shall give way to the street. The street is more beautiful. If the
street is not let into the church, it shall sweep over the church and
sweep around it, shall pile the floors of its strength upon it, above
it. From the roofs of labor--radiant and beautiful labor--shall men
look down upon its towers. Only a church that believes more than the
world believes shall lead the world. It always leads the world. It
cannot help leading it. The religion that lives in a machine age, and
that cannot see and feel, and make others see and feel, the meaning of
that machine age, is a religion which is not worthy of us. It is not
worthy of our machines. One of the machines we have made could make a
better religion than this. Even now, almost everywhere in almost every
town or city where one goes, if one will stop or look up or listen,
one hears the chimneys teaching the steeples. It would be blind for
more than a few years more to be discouraged about modern religion.
The telephone, the wireless telegraph, the X-rays, and all the other
great believers are singing up around it. The very railroads are
surrounding it and taking care of it. A few years more and the
steeples will stop hesitating and tottering in the sight of all the
people. They will no longer stand in fear before what the crowds of
chimneys and railways and the miles of smokestacks sweeping past are
saying to the people.
They will listen to what the smokestacks are saying to the people.
They will say it better.
In the meantime they are not listening.
Religion and art at the present moment, both blindfolded and both with
their ears stopped, are being swept to the same irrevocable issue. By
all poets and prophets the same danger signal shall be seen spreading
before them both jogging along their old highways. It is the arm that
reaches across the age.
RAILROAD CROSSING
LOOK OUT FOR THE ENGINE!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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