It was to attend a Congress of Churches that I crossed the Atlantic, but it is not listening to speeches that gives a realisation of any country. It is when wandering about the streets, sitting in cafés, listening in a smoking-car, or talking to a man in a hotel lounge that one forms some impression of the atmosphere which Americans breathe. It has been asserted, doubtless with truth, that human aberrations are a misplaced worship. That happiness which men were created to find in fellowship with the Highest, they seek in base and sensual forms. Drunkenness, on this theory, is a species of misdirected worship. If this be granted, then, Americans are of all nations the most devout. They worship the vast in every form. At Pittsburg you could hear a man rolling out statistics of millions of tons of steel a year; of harbour dues, though the city is far from the sea, that put even London and Glasgow in the shade; and as he speaks you feel that he has a thrill approaching adoration. He is on his knees before the greatest he knows. It is the same in everything. A town of 14,000 inhabitants in 1840 is now a city of a million. He rolls the figures as if they were a mystic ritual. Everything with which he has to do must be the greatest on the earth. I It was, however, in New York that one came to the inner shrine of American idealism. I had stayed for two days in the academic calm of Princeton, had heard Lord Bryce lecture in iced and polished and classic phrases on the age-long problem of Church and State; had spoken to two hundred theological students who might just be in Oxford or Edinburgh, for their eyes were just the same--the eyes of youth, who perennially believe that they at least were born to put this old world right. (That is the wonderful feeling that keeps pulpits filled--the feeling that however much the message has been spurned and others have failed, yet I cannot fail--glorious dream of youth!) From that atmosphere of reposeful idealism I was suddenly projected into the midst of New York. It was a bewildering experience. A friend who knew his way in the maze guided me to the Pennsylvania hotel, 'The biggest hotel in the world, with 2200 baths!' I found a room on the twentieth storey, served by an 'express' service of lifts. I could enter into the feelings of the countryman who, descending in one of those for the first time and seeing floor after floor flash past, murmured, 'Thank God, I am safe so far.' Having secured our 'baths' we went forth to see New York by night.