out 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 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, sublime 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