Perhaps religion in the twentieth century is Technique.
Technique in the twentieth century is the Holy Ghost.
Technique is the very last thing that has been thought of in religion. Religion is being converted before our eyes. It is becoming touched with the temper of science, with the thoroughness, the doggedness, the inconsolableness of science until it is seeing how and until it is saying how.
When the inventors, in our machine age, get to work on goodness in the way that they are getting to work on other things, things will begin to happen to goodness that the vague, sweet saints of two thousand years have never dreamed of yet.
In London and New York, in this first quarter of the twentieth century Christianity will not be put off as a spirit. The right of Christianity to be a spirit has lapsed.
Christianity is a Method.
What Christ meant when He said He was the Truth and the Life, has been understood, on the whole, very well. What He meant by saying He was the Way, we are now beginning, to work out.
A thousand or two years ago, when two men stood by the roadside and made a bargain, it was their affair.
When two men stand on the sidewalk now and make a bargain, say in New York, they have to deal and to deal very thoughtfully and accurately with ninety million people who are not there. They do this as well as they can by imagining what the ninety million people would do and say, and how they would like to be done by, if they were there.