Suddenly I find myself, throngs of voices all about me, standing half-unconsciously by a high iron fence in Bermondsey watching that smooth asphalt playground where one sees the very dead (for once) crowded by the living—pushed over to the edges—their gravestones tilted calmly up against the walls. I stand and look through the pickets and watch the children run and shout—the little funny, mockingly dressed, frowzily frumpily happy children, the stored-up sunshine of a thousand years all shining faintly out through the dirt, out through the generations in their little faces—"Will the Man come to me out of these?"
The tombstones lean against the wall and the children run and shout. As I watch them with my hopes and fears and the tombstones tilted against the walls—as I peer through the railings at the children, I face my three religions. What will the three religions do with the children? What will the children do with the three religions?
And now I will tell the truth. I will not cheat nor run away as sometimes I seem to have tried to do for years. I will no longer let myself be tricked by the mere glamour and bigness of our modern life nor swooned into good-will by the roll and liturgy of revolution, "of the people," "for the people," "by the people," nor will I be longer awed by those huge phrase-idols, constitutions, routines, that have roared around me "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"—those imperious, thoughtless, stupid tra-la-las of the People. Do the People see truth? Can the People see truth? Can all the crowd, and can all the machines, and all the cathedrals piled up together produce the Man, the Crowd-man or great man who sees truth?
And so with my three religions, I have three fears, one for each of them. There is the Machine fear, lest the crowd should be overswept by its machines and become like them; and the Crowd fear, lest the crowd should overlook its mighty innumerable and personal need of great men; and there is also the daily fear for the Church, lest the Church should not understand crowds and machines and grapple with crowds and machines, interpret them and glory in them and appropriate them for her own use and for God's—lest the Church should turn away from the crowds and the machines and graciously and idly bow down to Herself.
And now I am going to try to express these three fears that go with the three religions as well as I can, so that I can turn on them and face them and, God helping me, look them out of countenance.
CHAPTER II
THE CROWD SCARE
Time was when a man was born upon this planet in a somewhat lonely fashion. A few human beings out of all infinity stood by to care for him. He was brought up with hills and stars and a neighbour or so, until he grew to man's estate. He climbed at last over the farthest hill, and there, on the rim of things, standing on the boundary line of sky and earth that had always been the edge of life to him before, he looked forth upon the freedom of the world, and said in his soul, "What shall I be in this world I see, and whither shall I go in it?" And the sky and the earth and the rivers and the seas and the nights and the days beckoned to him, and the voices of life rose around him, and they all said, "Come!"
On a corner in New York, around a Street Department wagon, not so very long ago, five thousand men were fighting for shovels, fifty men to a shovel—a tool for living a little longer.