ne. If he lives in either he wraps the other about him. He makes men
walk on air. He drills out rocks with a cloud and he breaks open
mountains with gas. The more perfect he makes his machines the more
spiritual they are, the more their power hides itself. The more the
machines of the man loom in human life the more they reach down into
silence, and into darkness. Their foundations are infinity. The
infinity which is the man's infinity is their infinity. The machines
grasp all space for him. They lean out on ether. They are the man's
machines. The man has made them and the man worships with them. From
the first breath of flame, burning out the secret of the Dust to the
last shadow of the dust--the breathless, soundless shadow of the dust,
which he calls electricity--the man worships the invisible, the
intangible. Electricity is his prophet. It sums him up. It sums up his
modern world and the religion and the arts of his modern world. Out of
all the machines that he has made the electric machine is the most
modern because it is the most spiritual. The empty and futile look of
a trolley wire does not trouble the modern man. It is his instinctive
expression of himself. All the habits of electricity are his habits.
Electricity has the modern man's temperament--the passion of being
invisible and irresistible. The electric machine fills him with
brotherhood and delight. It is the first of the machines that he can
not help seeing is like himself. It is the symbol of the man's highest
self. His own soul beckons to him out of it.

And the more electricity grows the more like the man it grows, the
more spirit-like it is. The telegraph wire around the globe is melted
into the wireless telegraph. The words of his spirit break away from
the dust. They envelop the earth like ether, and Human Speech, at
last, unconquerable, immeasurable, subtle as the light of
stars,--fights its way to God.

The man no longer gropes in the dull helpless ground or through the
froth of heaven for the spirit. Having drawn to him the X-ray, which
makes spirit out of dust, and the wireless telegraph, which makes
earth out of air, he delves into the deepest sea as a cloud. He
strides heaven. He has touched the hem of the garment at last of
ELECTRICITY--the archangel of matter.

IV

ON MAKING PEOPLE PROUD OF THE WORLD

Religion consists in being proud of the Creator. Poetry is largely the
same feeling--a kind of personal joy one takes in the wa