We are a new human race grappling with a new world. Our Christianity has not been invented yet and if we want a G.o.d, 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 pa.s.sing wonderful is a spirit at first. G.o.d 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.
As he groped his way up in his singing, he felt them in spirit, perhaps, the lonely wandering minstrels in little closed-in valleys, or on the vast quiet hills, filling the world with his voice when he was dead, going about with his singing, breaking it in upon the souls of children, of the new boys and girls, and building new worlds and rebuilding old worlds in the hearts of men. Homer had the spirit of hearing his own voice forever, but the technique of it, the important point of seeing how the thing could really be done, of seeing how people, instead of listening to imitations or copies or awkward echoes of Homer, should listen to Homer"s voice itself--the timbre, the intimacy, the subtlety, the strength of it--the depth of his heart singing out of it. All this has had to wait to be thought out by Thomas A. Edison.
Man has not only for thousands of years had the spirit of immortality, of keeping his voice filed away if any one wanted it on the earth, forever, but he has had all the other spirits or ghosts of his mightier self. He has had the spirit of being imperious and wilful with the sea, of faring forth on a planet and playing with oceans, and now he has worked out the details in ocean liners, in boats that fly up from the water, and in boats which dive and swim beneath the sea. For thousands of years he has had the spirit of the locomotive working through, troops of runners or of dim men groping defiantly with camels through deserts, or sweeping on on horses through the plains, and now with his banners of steam at last he has great public trains of cars carrying cities.
For hundreds of years man has had the spirit of the motor-car--of having his own private locomotive or his own special train drive up to his door--the spirit of making every road his railway. For a great many years he has had the spirit of the wireless telegraph and of using the sky. Franklin tried using the sky years ago but all he got was electricity. Marconi knew how better. Marconi has got ghosts of men"s voices out of the clouds, has made heaven a sounding board for great congregations of cities, and faraway nations wrapped in darkness and silence whisper round the rolling earth. Man has long had the spirit of defying the seas. Now he has the technique and the motor-boat. He has had the spirit of removing oceans and of building huge, underground cities, the spirit of caves in the ground and mansions in the sky, and now he has subways and skysc.r.a.pers. For a thousand years he has had the spirit of Christ and now there is Frederick Taylor, Louis Brandeis, Westfield Pure Food, Doctor Carrel, Jane Addams, and Filene"s Store.
Vast networks--huge spiritual machines of goodness are crowding and penetrating to-day, fifteen pounds to the square inch, the atmosphere of the gospel into the very core of the matter of the world, into the everyday things, into the solids of the lives of men.
It takes two great spirits of humanity to bring a great truth or a new goodness into this world; one spirit creates it, the other conceives it, gathers the earth about it and gives it birth. These two spirits seem to be the spirits of the poet and the scientist.
We are taking to-day, many of us, an almost religious delight in them both. We make no comparisons.
We note that the poet"s inspiration comes first and consists in saying something that is true, that cannot be proved.
A few people with imagination, here and there, believe it.
The scientist"s inspiration comes second and consists in seeing ways of proving it, of making it matter of fact.
He proves it by seeing how to do it.
Crowds believe it.
CHAPTER XIX
AND THE MACHINE STARTS
One of the things that makes one thoughtful in going about from city to city and dropping into the churches is the way the people do not sing in them and will not pray in them. In every new strange city where one stops on a Sunday morning, one looks hopefully--while one hears the chimes of bells--at the row of steeples down the street. One looks for people going in who seem to go with chimes of bells. And when one goes in, one finds them again and again, inside, all these bolt-up-right, faintly sing-song congregations.
One wonders about the churches.
What is there that is being said in them that should make any one feel like singing?
The one thing that the churches are for is news--news that would be suitable to sing about, and that would naturally make one want to sing and pray after one had heard it.
There is very little occasion to sing or to pray over old news.
Worship would take care of itself in our churches if people got the latest and biggest news in them.
News is the latest faith men have in one another, the last thing they have dared to get from G.o.d.
It is not impossible that just at the present moment, and for some little time to come, there is really very little worth while that can be said about Christianity, until Christianity has been tried. I cannot conceive of Christ"s coming back and saying anything just at the moment.
He would merely wonder why, in all these two thousand years, we had not arranged to do anything about what He had said before. He would wonder how we could keep on so, making his great faith for us so poetic, visionary, and inefficient.
It is in the unconscious recognition of this and of the present spiritual crisis of the world, that our best men, so many of them, instead of going into preaching are going into laboratories and into business where what the gospel really is and what it is really made of, is being at last revealed to people--where news is being created.
Perhaps it would not be precisely true--what I have said, about Christ"s not saying anything. He probably would. But he would not say these same merely rudimentary things. He would go on to the truths and applications we have never heard or guessed. The rest of his time he would put in in proving that the things that had been merely said two thousand years ago, could be done now. And He would do what He could toward having them dropped forever, taken for granted and acted on as a part of the morally automatic and of-course machinery of the world.
The Golden Rule takes or ought to take, very soon now, in real religion, somewhat the same position that table manners take in morals.
All good manners are good in proportion as they become automatic. In saying that honesty pays we are merely moving religion on to its more creative and newer levels. We are a.s.serting that the literal belief in honesty, after this, ought to be attended to practically by machinery.
People ought to be honest automatically and by a.s.sumption, by dismissing it in business in particular, as a thing to be taken for granted.
This is what is going to happen.
Without the printing press a book would cost about ten thousand dollars, each copy.
With the printing press, the first copy of a book costs perhaps about six hundred dollars.
The second costs--twenty-nine cents.
The same principle holds good under the law of moral automatics.
Let the plates be cast. Everything follows. The fire in the Iroquois Theatre in Chicago cost six hundred dead bodies.
Within a few months outward opening doors flew open to the streets around a world.
Everybody knew about outward opening doors before.
They had the spirit of outward opening doors. But the machinery for making everybody know that they knew it--the moral and spiritual machinery for lifting over the doors of a world and making them all swing suddenly generation after generation the other way, had not been set up.
Of course it would have been better if there had been three hundred dead bodies or three dead bodies--but the principle holds good--let the moral plates be cast and the huge moral values follow with comparatively little individual moral hand labour. The moral hand labour moves on to more original things.
The same principle holds good in letting an American city be good in seeing how to make goodness in a city work.
Let the plates be once cast--say Galveston, Texas; or De Moines, Iowa, and goodness after you have your first specimen gets national automatically.
Two hundred and five cities have adopted the Galveston or commission government in three years.
The failure for the time being apparently of the more n.o.ble and aggressive kinds of goodness against the forces of evil is a matter of technique. Our failure is not due to our failure to know what evil really is, but due to our wasteful way of tunnelling through it.
Our religious inventors have failed to use the most scientific method.
We have gone at the matter of b.u.t.ting through evil without thinking enough. Less b.u.t.ting and more thinking is our religion now. We will not try any longer to b.u.t.t a whole planet when we try to keep one man from doing wrong.