BOOK TWO

      LETTING THE CROWDS BE GOOD


      CHAPTER XVII

      THE CROWDS PUSH

      THE men who are ahead make goodness start, but it is the
      crowds that make it irresistible.

      The final, slow, long, imperious lift on goodness is the one
      the crowd gives. Of course, for the most part, modern business
      is largely done with crowds. Crowds are doing it and crowds
      are nearly always watching it.

      The factory is slower than the department store in being
      good because the men. in it deal with crowds of things and
      crowds of wheels and not with crowds of people.

      All responsible people are forced to be good, with crowds
      around them, expecting it of them.

      Crowds at the very least are a kind of vast, insinuating,
      penetrating, omnipresent, permeating police force of right-
      eousness.

      In a department store, the crowds, twelve thousand a day,
      are like some huge coil of hose or vacuum cleaner, lying about
      the place, sucking up, drawing out, and demanding goodness
      from the clerks. Clerks develop human insight and powers
      faster in department stores than machinists do in factories
      because they are exposed to more people and to larger crowds.

      The stream clears itself.

      The last forms of business to yield to the new spirit are to be
      the lonely ones, the ones where light, air, human emotions, and
      crowds are shut out.

      The lonely forms of business will at last be vitalized and
      socialized by men of organizing genius, who will invent the
      equivalent of crowds going by, who will contrive ways of putting
      a few responsible persons in sight or in a position where they [185]
      will feel crowds going by their souls, looking into them as if they
      were shop windows. Crowds can keep track of a few. The
      crowds will see that these few are the kind of men who will keep
      track of all.

      Crowds in the end will not accept less than the best. With
      crowds of people and crowds of places and crowds of times we
      are good. In all things crowds can see or be made to see we are
      safe. Progress lies in making crowds see through people,
      making crowds go past them. While they are going past them,
      they lure their goodness on.
 


      CHAPTER XVIII

      THE MAN WHO SAYS HOW, SAYS HOW

      THE people who are worried and discouraged about goodness
      in this world, one finds when one studies them a little, are
      almost always worried in a kind of general way. They do not
      worry about anything in particular. Their religion seems to
      be a kind of good-hearted, pained vagueness.

      The religion of the people who never worry at all, the
      thoughtless optimists, is quite the same too, except that they
      have a kind of happy, rosy-lighted vagueness instead.

      For about two thousand years now, goodness has been in
      the hands of vague people. Some of them have used their
      vagueness to cry with softly, and some of them have used it to
      praise God with and to have many fine, brave, general feelings
      about God.

      I have tried faithfully, speaking for one, to be religious with
      both of these sets of people.

      They make one feel rather lonesome.

      If one goes about and takes a grim happiness, a kind of iron
      joy in seeing how successful a locomotive is, or if one watches
      a great, worshipful ocean liner with delight, or if, down in
      New York, one looks up and sees a new skyscraper going
      slowly up, unfolding into the sky before one, lifting up its
      gigantic, restless, resistless face to God; there comes to seem to
      be something about churches and about good people and about
      the way they have of acting and thinking about goodness and
      doing things with goodness, that makes one unhappy.

      Perhaps one has just come from it and one's soul is filled with
      the stern, glad singing of a great foundry, of the religious,
      victorious praising spirit. of man, dipping up steel in mighty [187]
      spoonfuls—the stuff the inside of the earth is made of, and
      flinging it together into a great network or crust for the planet
      —into mighty floors or sidewalks all round the earth for
      cities to tread on and there comes to seem something so
      successful, so manlike, so godlike about it, about the way
      these men who do these things do them and do what they set
      out to do, that when I find myself suddenly, all in a few minutes
      on a Sunday morning, thrown out of this atmosphere into a
      Christian church, find myself sitting all still and waiting, with
      all these good people about me, and when I find them offering
      me their religion so gravely, so hopefully, it all comes to me
      with a great rush sometimes—comes to me as out of great deeps
      of resentment, that religion could possibly be made in a church
      to seem something so faint, so beautifully weary, so dreamy,
      and as if it were humming softly, absently to itself.

      I wonder in the presence of a Christianity like this whether
      I am a Christian or not—the quartet choirs, confections,
      the little, dainty, faintly sweet sermons—it is as if—no I will
      not say it. . . . . . .

      I have this moment crossed the words out before my eyes.
      It is as if, after all, religion, instead of being as I supposed
      down at the foundry, the stern and splendid music of man
      conquering all things for God, were, after all, some huge, sub-
      blime and holy vagueness, as if the service and the things
      I saw about me were not hard true realities—as if going to
      Church were like sitting in a cloud—some soft musical cloud
      or floating island of goodness and drifting and drifting. . . .

      . . . . . . .

      Not all churches are alike, but I am speaking of something
      that must have happened to many men. I but record this
      blank space on this page, as a spiritual fact, as a part of the
      religious experience of a man trying to be good.

      When this little experience of which the words have to be
      crossed out—after going to Church—finally settles down, [188]
      there is still a grim truth left in it.

      The vagueness of the man who is good, who locks himself up
      in a Church and says, "Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!" and the
      vigour and incisiveness of the man who says nothing about it
      and who goes out of doors and acts like a god all the week—
      these remain with me as a daily and abiding sense.

      And when I find myself myself, I, who have gloried in cathe-
      drals since I was a little child, looking ahead for a God upon
      the earth, and when I see the foundries, the airships, the ocean
      liners beckoning the soul of man upon the skies, and the victory
      of the soul over the dust and over the water and over the air and
      when I see the Cathedrals beside them, those vast, faint, grave,
      happy, floating islands of the Saved, drifting backward down
      the years, it does not seem as if I could bear the foundries saying
      one thing about my God and the cathedrals saying another.

      I have tried to see a way out. Why should it be so?

      I have seen that the foundries, the ocean liners, and the air-
      ships are in the hands of men who say How.

      Perhaps we will take goodness and cathedrals, very soon
      now, and put them for a while in the hands of the men who say
      how. If St. Francis, for instance, to-day, were to be suddenly
      more like Bessemer, or if Dr. Henry Van Dyke were more like
      Edison or if the Reverend R. J. Campbell were more like Sir
      Joseph Lister or if the Bishop of London were to go at London
      the way Marconi goes at the sky, what would begin to
      happen to goodness? One likes to imagine what would happen
      if that same spirit, the spirit of "how" were brought to bear
      upon a great engineering enterprise like goodness in this world.

      Perhaps the spirit of "how" is the spirit of God.

      Perhaps religion in the twentieth century is Technique.

      Technique in the twentieth century is the Holy Ghost.

      Technique is the very last thing that has been thought of in
      religion. Religion is being converted before our eyes. It is
      becoming touched with the temper of science, with the thorough-
      ness, the doggedness, the inconsolableness of science until it is [189]
      seeing how and until it is saying how.

      When the inventors, in our machine age, get to work on
      goodness in the way that they are getting to work on other
      things, things will begin to happen to goodness that the vague,
      sweet saints of two thousand years have never dreamed of yet.

      In London and New York, in this first quarter of the
      twentieth century Christianity will not be put off as a spirit.
      The right of Christianity to be a spirit has lapsed.

      Christianity is a Method.

      What Christ meant when He said He was the Truth and the
      Life, has been understood, on the whole, very well. What
      He meant by saying He was the Way, we are now beginning,
      to work out.

      . . . . . . .

      A thousand or two years ago, when two men stood by the
      roadside and made a bargain, it was their affair.

      When two men stand on the sidewalk now and make a bargain,
      say in New York, they have to deal and to deal very thought-
      fully and accurately with ninety million people who are not
      there. They do this as well as they can by imagining what
      the ninety million people would do and say, and how they
      would like to be done by, if they were there.

      The facilities for finding out what the ninety million people
      would do and say, and what they would want, the general
      conveniences for assuring the two men on the sidewalk that
      they will be able to conduct their bargain, and to get the other
      ninety million in, accurately, that they will be able to do by
      them as they would be done by—these have scarcely been
      arranged for yet.

      In our machine age, with our railroads, and our tele-
      phones suddenly heaping our lives up on one another's
      lives, almost before we have noticed it, our religious
      machinery to go with our other machinery, our machinery
      that we are going to be Christians with, has not been invented [190]
      yet.

      Religion two-men size, or man and woman size, or one family
      or two family size or village size has been worked out. Religion
      as long as it has been concerned with a few people and was a
      matter of love between neighbours, or of skill in being neigh-
      bourly, has had no special or imperative need for science or
      the scientific man.

      Now that religion is obliged to be an intimate, a confiding
      relation between ninety million people, the spiritual genius,
      devotion, and holiness of the scientific man, of the man who
      says "how" has come to be the modern man's almost only
      access to his God.

      A ninety million man-power religion is an enterprise of
      spiritual engineering, a feat in national and international states-
      manship, a gigantic structural constructive achievement in
      human nature. Doing as one would be done by, with a few
      people, is a thing that any man can sit down and read his Bible
      a few minutes and arrange for himself. He can manage to do
      as he would be done by, fairly well in the next yard. But
      bow about doing as one would be done by with ninety million
      people—all sizes, all climates, all religions, Buffalo, New
      Orleans, Seattle? How about doing as one would be done by
      three thousand miles?

      It is an understatement to say, as We look about our modern
      world, that Christianity has not been tried yet.

      Christianity has not been invented yet.

      What was invented two thousand years ago was the spirit
      of Christianity.

      Christianity has been for two thousand years a spirit.

      It is almost like a new religion to me just of itself to think
      of it. It is like being presented suddenly with a new world to
      think of it, to think that all we have really done with Christian-
      ity as yet is to use it as a breath or spirit.

      I look at the vision of the earth to-day, of the great cities
      rushing together at last and running around the world like [191]
      children running around a house—great cities shouting on the
      seas, suddenly sliding up and down the globe, playing hop-
      scotch on the equator, scrambling up the poles—all these
      colossal children! . . . Here we all are!—a whiff of steam
      from the Watts's steam kettle and a wave of Marconi across the
      air and we have crept up from our little separate sunsets, all our
      little private national bedrooms of light and darkness into the
      one single same cunning dooryard of a world! Our religion,
      our politics, our Bibles, kings, millionaires, crowds, bombs,
      prophets and railroads all hurling, sweeping, crashing our lives
      together in a kind of vast international collision of intimacy.

      All the Christianity we can bring to bear or that we can use
      to run this crash of intimacy with is a spirit, a breath.

      We do not well to berate one another or to berate one
      another's motives or to assail human nature or to grow satirical
      about God with all our little battered helpless Christians
      about us and our unadjusted religions.

      We are a new human race grappling with a new world.

      Our Christianity has not been invented yet and if we want a
      God, 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 passing wonderful is a spirit at first. God
      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. [192]
      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 build-
      ing 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 anyone 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 [193]
      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 congrega-
      tions 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
      skyscrapers. 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.