I have this moment crossed the words out before my eyes. It is as if, after all, religion, instead of being as I supposed down at the foundry, the stern and splendid music of man conquering all things for God, were, after all, some huge, sublime and holy vagueness, as if the service and the things I saw about me were not hard true realities—as if going to Church were like sitting in a cloud—some soft musical cloud or floating island of goodness and drifting and drifting....
Not all churches are alike, but I am speaking of something that must have happened to many men. I but record this blank space on this page, as a spiritual fact, as a part of the religious experience of a man trying to be good.
When this little experience of which the words have to be crossed out after going to Church—finally settles down, there is still a grim truth left in it.
The vagueness of the man who is good, who locks himself up in a Church and says, "Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!" and the vigour and incisiveness of the man who says nothing about it and who goes out of doors and acts like a god all the week—these remain with me as a daily and abiding sense.
And when I find myself myself, I, who have gloried in cathedrals since I was a little child, looking ahead for a God upon the earth, and when I see the foundries, the airships, the ocean liners beckoning the soul of man upon the skies, and the victory of the soul over the dust and over the water and over the air and when I see the Cathedrals beside them, those vast, faint, grave, happy, floating islands of the Saved, drifting backward down the years, it does not seem as if I could bear the foundries saying one thing about my God and the cathedrals saying another.
I have tried to see a way out. Why should it be so?
I have seen that the foundries, the ocean liners, and the airships are in the hands of men who say How.
Perhaps we will take goodness and cathedrals, very soon now, and put them for a while in the hands of the men who say how. If St. Francis, for instance, to-day, were to be suddenly more like Bessemer, or if Dr. Henry Van Dyke were more like Edison or if the Reverend R.J. Campbell were more like Sir Joseph Lister or if the Bishop of London were to go at London the way Marconi goes at the sky, what would begin to happen to goodness? One likes to imagine what would happen if that same spirit, the spirit of "how" were brought to bear upon a great engineering enterprise like goodness in this world.
Perhaps the spirit of "how" is the spirit of God.