can have hurry and crowd together, he is capable of almost
anything. These two sensibilities, the sense of motion and the sense of
mass, are all that is left of the original, lusty, tasting and seeing
and feeling human being who took possession of the earth. And even in
the case of comparatively rudimentary and somewhat stupid senses like
these, the sense of motion, with the average civilised man, is so blunt
that he needs to be rushed along at seventy miles an hour to have the
feeling that he is moving, and his sense of mass is so degenerate that
he needs to live with hundreds of thousands of people next door to know
that he is not alone. He is seen in his most natural state,--this
civilised being,--with most of his civilisation around him, in the seat
of an elevated railway train, with a crowded newspaper before his eyes,
and another crowded newspaper in his lap, and crowds of people reading
crowded newspapers standing round him in the aisles; but he can never be
said to be seen at his best, in a spectacle like this, until the
spectacle moves, until it is felt rushing over the sky of the street,
puffing through space; in which delectable pell-mell and carnival of
hurry--hiss in front of it, shriek under it, and dust behind it--he
finds, to all appearances at least, the meaning of this present world
and the hope of the next. Hurry and crowd have kissed each other and his
soul rests. "If Abraham sitting in his tent door waiting for angels had
been visited by a spectacle like this and invited to live in it all his
days, would he not have climbed into it cheerfully enough?" asks the
modern man. Living in a tent would have been out of the question, and
waiting for angels--waiting for anything, in fact--forever impossible.

Whatever else may be said of Abraham, his waiting for angels was the
making of him, and the making of all that is good in what has followed
since. The man who hangs on a strap--up in the morning and down at
night, hurrying between the crowd he sleeps with and the crowd he works
with, to the crowd that hurries no more,--even this man, such as he is,
with all his civilisation roaring about him, would have been impossible
if Abraham in the stately and quiet days had not waited at his tent door
for angels to begin a civilisation with, or if he had been the kind of
Abraham that expected that angels would come hurrying and scurrying
after one in a spectacle like this. "What has a man," says Blank in his
_Angel