The facilities for finding out what the ninety million people would do and say, and what they would want, the general conveniences for assuring the two men on the sidewalk that they will be able to conduct their bargain, and to get the other ninety million in, accurately, that they will be able to do by them as they would be done by—these have scarcely been arranged for yet.
In our machine age, with our railroads, and our telephones suddenly heaping our lives up on one another's lives, almost before we have noticed it, our religious machinery to go with our other machinery, our machinery that we are going to be Christians with, has not been invented yet.
Religion two-men size, or man and woman size, or one family or two family size or village size has been worked out. Religion as long as it has been concerned with a few people and was a matter of love between neighbours, or of skill in being neighbourly, has had no special or imperative need for science or the scientific man.
Now that religion is obliged to be an intimate, a confiding relation between ninety million people, the spiritual genius, devotion, and holiness of the scientific man, of the man who says "how" has come to be the modern man's almost only access to his God.
A ninety million man-power religion is an enterprise of spiritual engineering, a feat in national and international statesmanship, a gigantic structural constructive achievement in human nature. Doing as one would be done by, with a few people, is a thing that any man can sit down and read his Bible a few minutes and arrange for himself. He can manage to do as he would be done by, fairly well in the next yard. But how about doing as one would be done by with ninety million people—all sizes, all climates, all religions, Buffalo, New Orleans, Seattle? How about doing as one would be done by three thousand miles?
It is an understatement to say, as we look about our modern world, that Christianity has not been tried yet.
Christianity has not been invented yet.
What was invented two thousand years ago was the spirit of Christianity.
Christianity has been for two thousand years a spirit.
It is almost like a new religion to me just of itself to think of it. It is like being presented suddenly with a new world to think of it, to think that all we have really done with Christianity as yet is to use it as a breath or spirit.