“Better housing for the poor” is necessary, but so it is for the rich, for all of us. Truer housing; housing suitable to the age we live in; housing proper to the human soul. We build “the house of God,” bringing to it the highest love and power and aspiration; and that house uplifts the soul of the beholder. What prevents our building the houses of Man with that high love and power and aspiration—that splendid beauty, ennobling space, and tender ornament? Only that ancient, shrivelled, artificially preserved mummy, the Ego concept, prevents.
You cannot build right houses for modern humanity on the basis of a kitchen, on the service of the belly of a beast. Rightly to nourish all people makes the feeding of humanity as noble a form of work as any other work broad and beautiful and true, to be devoutly entered upon and grandly fulfilled; to cater only to the bodily desires of one’s own family is proper to the level of meanest savagery.
A rearrangement of ideas and their consequent feelings, from the process false to the process true, is possible to any sane mind, is the duty of every last one of us. A rearrangement of the external conditions follows logically and helps materially. This we can do in the mind at once, in the body not so promptly, but still swiftly in our age of mechanical wonders. And why should we? What will it mean to us? We should, for underlying cause, because it is in the line of social evolution; a race duty. Because in doing it we further the divine purpose, we fulfil ultimate law. But if the so-long-stunted soul demands its pay, there is reason more than enough.
Are men so happy now, each trying to take care of himself and his family, that they should dread the peace and ease given by society’s vast resources in full circulation? Are women so happy now, either the squaw or the parasite, that they should dread becoming full human beings, active, conscious members of society? What this change will mean to us no one can fully measure, but those who know anything of the real heart of humanity, those who can interpret the gleams of light that break through all religions, those who ever felt the soul lift and light and swell with power and joy, under the influence of music, or painting, or speech, or any form of human work, can tell us something of it.
We have been taught, in tattered remnants of worn-out faiths, to despise human nature. We, forsooth, mere worms and weaklings, “as prone to evil as the sparks are to fly upward,” we were born in iniquity, conceived in sin, doomed to suffer here, and likely to suffer forever, important worms that we were!
We have been taught in later days, by half-seeing students of science, that we were but beasts, and must fight it out as they did, our progress lying in the slow and painful process of survival.
What a change in thought, in feeling, in action, when we see that we are the crowning form of created life, we, collectively, though never so much “worms” taken personally. That Humanity is the one fact we should realise, and that in it we find free scope and full satisfaction for all the vague aspirations which have haunted the individual. That in that organic social life we are all held together by our mutual service, by our work, and that in our work and only in our work lies growth, lies peace, lies the highest human duty, lies happiness.
Happiness, for a human being, is in full, true, conscious, social relation:
To feel the world’s life, unbroken in its steady pour, from the inchoate nebulæ, through age on age of changing orders, into the spreading growth of an organised democracy. To feel our own historic family, the immense racial pride of the long ascent, the conquest of elements, of plants, of animals, the unquenchable fire of progress, the vast and rapid increase of the race: To feel the extending light of common consciousness as Society comes alive!—the tingling “I” that reaches wider and wider in every age, that is sweeping through the world to-day like an electric current, that lifts and lights and enlarges the human soul in kindling majesty: To feel the power! the endless power! Not only the ceaseless stream of the universal Godness, but our interminable array of batteries, full charged; the stored energy of all time embodied in poem and story, in picture and statue, in music and architecture, in every tool, utensil, and giant machine wherein the human brain and the human hand have made force incarnate:
And, so feeling, to Do: