There was no need of church bells the first gasolineless Sunday,
reminding one noisily, cheerily, a little thoughtlessly--the way they
do--that God was on the earth.

One could watch two thousand years turning on a hinge. But the first
gasolineless Sunday--five hundred thousand miles of still roads lifted
themselves up under the sky on the mountains, out on the plains, saying
for a hundred million people, "God still reigneth." And twenty million
little birds stood on the edges of the trees and stared down at five
hundred thousand miles of still white country roads wondering what had
happened!

I cannot quite express, and never shall be able to, the sense I had when
I waked up in the Grand Central Station that morning, when out of
communing with the sea, with a hundred thousand lonely spruces, and out
of the great roaring dark of the night I stepped into the street, into
the long, white silent prayer of my people--and prayed with a hundred
million people its silent prayer for a world. I saw the mighty streets of
a nation, from Maine to California, lifted up as a vow to God.

We have learned one thing about ourselves and our attention during the
war. One gasolineless Sunday attracts more attention to this country, to
the great wager it had put up on whipping the Germans, than twenty-four
full page ads in a thousand papers could do.

Mr. Garfield may not have turned out to be a genius in mining coal, but
in undermining the daily personal habits of a hundred million people--in
advertising to people wholesale, so that people breathe advertisement,
eat advertisement, make the very streets they walk on and the windows
they look out of into advertisements of the fate of their country, into
prayers for a world--Mr. Garfield had few equals.

To advertise a religion or a war, stop the intimate daily personal habits
of a hundred million people. Select something like being warmed or like
being sweetened that does not leave out a mortal soul or slight a single
stomach in the country.

To advertise history, to advertise the next two hundred years to a
hundred million people--go in through the kitchen door of every house
with ten pounds of flour when they want twenty, with two pounds of sugar
when they ordered eight.

Make every butcher boy a prophet. Make people sip their coffee thinking
of the next two hundred years. Make streets into posters. Make people
look out of their windows on streets--thousands of miles of streets