If I wanted to take a spiritual census of modern civilization and get at the actual scientific facts, what we would have to call, probably the foot-tons of religion in the world to-day, I would not look for them in the year-books of the churches, I would get them by going about in the great department stores, by moving among the men and women in them day after day, and standing by and looking on invisibly. Like a shadow or a light I would watch them registering their goodness daily, hourly, on their counters, over their counters, measuring out their souls before God in dress goods, shoes, boas, hats, silk, and bread and butter!
This may not be true of the Orient, but it is true, and getting to be more true every day, of Europe and America.
It is especially true of America. In the things which we borrow in America, we are far behind the rest of the world. It is to the things that we create, that we must look alone, for our larger destiny, and our world-service.
Naturally, in so far as civilization is a race of borrowing, nations like England and France and Germany a few hundred miles apart from one another, set the pace for a nation that is three thousand miles away from where it can borrow, like the United States. It is a far cry from the land of the Greeks with their still sunny temples and dreams, and from England with its quiet-singing churches, to New York with its practical sky-scraping hewing prayer!
New York—scooping its will out of the very heavens!
New York—the World's last, most stern, perhaps most manful prayer of all—half-asking and half-grasping out of the hand of God!
Here is America's religion! Half afraid at first, half glad, slowly, solemnly triumphant, as on the edge of an abyss, I have seen America's religion! I have seen my brother Americans hewing it out—day by day, night by night, have I seen them—in these huge steel sub-cellars of the sky!
I have accepted the challenge.
If it is not a religion, then it shall be to us a religion to make it a religion.
The Metropolitan Tower with its big clock dial, with its three stories of telling what time it is, and its great bell singing hymns above the dizzy flocks of the skyscrapers, is the soul of New York, to me.