an-power religion is an enterprise of spiritual
engineering, a feat in national and international statesmanship, 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
how 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 Christianity 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 children running
around a house--great cities shouting on the seas, suddenly sliding up
and down the globe, playing hopscotch 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, d