him anything before? As he looks back through his life there is
one experience that stands out by itself in all those boyhood
years--the choking in his throat--the strange grip upon him--upon his
body and upon his soul--as of some awful unseen Hand reaching down
Space to him, drawing him up to Its might. He was like a dazed child
being held up before It--held up to an infinite fact, that he might
look at it again and again.

The first conception of what the life of man was like, of what it
might be like, came to at least one immortal soul not from lips that
he loved, or from a face behind a pulpit, or a voice behind a desk,
but from a machine. To this day that Corliss engine is the engine of
dreams, the appeal to destiny, to the imagination and to the soul. It
rebuilds the universe. It is the opportunity of beauty throughout
life, the symbol of freedom, the freedom of men, and of the unity of
nations, and of the worship of God. In silence--like the soft far
running of the sky--it wrought upon him there; like some heroic human
spirit, its finger on a thousand wheels, through miles of aisles, and
crowds of gazers, it wrought. The beat and rhythm of it was as the
beat and rhythm of the heart of man mastering matter, of the clay
conquering God.

Like some wonder-crowded chorus its voices surrounded me. It was the
first hearing of the psalm of life. The hum and murmur of it was like
the spell of ages upon me; and the vision that floated in it--nay, the
vision that was builded in it--was the vision of the age to be: the
vision of Man, My Brother, after the singsong and dance and drone of
his sad four thousand years, lifting himself to the stature of his
soul at last, lifting himself with the sun, and with the rain, and
with the wind, and the heat and the light, into comradeship with
Creation morning, and into something (in our far-off, wistful fashion)
of the might and gentleness of God.

There seem to be two ways to worship Him. One way is to gaze upon the
great Machine that He has made, to watch it running softly above us
all, moonlight and starlight, and winter and summer, rain and
snowflakes, and growing things. Another way is to worship Him not only
because He has made the vast and still machine of creation, in the
beating of whose days and nights we live our lives, but because He has
made a Machine that can make machines--because out of the dust of the
earth He has made a Machine that shall take more of the dust of t