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, 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 cathedrals 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 airships 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 thoroughness, the doggedness, the
inconsolablenes