But there has never been a revolution of any kind in world history that did not bring with it a revolution of all that tradition had established and custom made familiar. And this revolution, peaceful or otherwise, that is upon us differs from earlier examples in that its economic nature is clearly distinguished and, therefore, its challenge to all that we term esthetic, cultural, spiritual, religious, doubly sharp and direct. Food, clothing, and recreation, not religious or political liberty, are its legitimate, but also its only expressed, objects. If it gains these at the expense of the soul—of what we all understand by the soul in the ancient warning, “What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”—if it gains material welfare and material welfare only, it will fail; and if it fails, we all go down with it.
In western Europe, one guesses, the struggle between a socialism always threatening to become purely materialistic and our own imperfect order will be differently conducted. There, and, especially in France and Great Britain, church organizations are powerful politically, socially, and in their grip upon the popular imagination. They will sharpen the conflict and confuse the issues, making the struggle seem to resemble many earlier combats between church and anti-church. But in bourgeois America no such easy and fallacious division will be possible. Here the question as to whether the new order is to satisfy the religious and moral, as well as the economic, needs of society will rest squarely upon the individual person. No church can speak for America, for no church ever has held or ever can hold Americans together. The responsibility here, and ultimately in Europe, must be personal. It will come to the question of how much religion is possessed by the normal American. When he is aroused by a struggle that sweeps into far wider questions than the tariff or the income tax, when his method of working, his method of living, his method of thinking, are all challenged by a new and militant social order, more dormant idealism, more latent cynicisms, intenser passions, will be aroused than one would ever have suspected in that shrewd and easy-going face in the Pullman smoker. Will religion be aroused also?
It is essential that we should bring about a better distribution of wealth; that we should give every child the equal opportunity that Jefferson had in mind when he wrote the vague, but magnificent, phrases of the Declaration of Independence. Democracy cannot be said to have been tried until we have made an economic democracy, and we are too far on the road of democratic experiment to stop half-way. But it is even more essential that we should carry on into the new community our moral enthusiasm, our ideals, and also that reverence for the shaping power, and love for its manifestations that lie behind them, and constitute the religious emotion which I shall not here attempt otherwise to define. Many fear that the nice taste, the trained mind, which have been borne upon the crest of civilization, will go down in the welter of indistinguishable breakers. There is little danger of this, since already it is the intellectuals who direct, and will direct, the new movement; and the professional man stands to gain as much as the laborer by a peaceful revolution. But in a socialistic world, built on the recovery of the unearned increment, standardized by wages, whose raison d’être is the distribution of wealth, it is the religious instinct, with all that its free development implies for democracy, that is in the gravest danger. If we all become relatively rich—and this is an idea of the earthly paradise that socialism undoubtedly encourages—how many will crawl through the eye of the needle?
The labor party is not immediately responsible for the saving or the freeing of the religious instinct. Its first objectives are the comforts and material opportunities of civilization; and until these are reached we have no right to expect religious leadership from the proletariat. If any one is responsible, it is the old American, the bourgeois American. He has inherited the spiritual tradition of his ancestors; he has profited by emancipation from superstition and institutional tyranny; he has lived in a comfortable world with opportunities to illumine the spirit by literature and the arts and education. He is not going to be crushed or driven out of his inheritance; there are too many of him, and he too closely resembles in everything but habit of life the proletariat that is rising. Upon this American rests the burden of spiritualizing as well as educating his new masters—upon the moral enthusiasts, the traditionalists, the seekers, most of all. It is such a task as the church faced in the dark ages, when barbarians had to be not only spiritualized, but civilized as well. It is a lesser task, for our new invaders are not barbarians, and their leaders are intellectually the equal of ours. Whether the outlook for success is greater, depends upon the spirit we bring to the enterprise. Our knowledge is greater; is our will that man should make more than a market of his time, sleeping and feeding, as great as the great wills of earlier centuries?
No one can answer; but of this we can be assured, that the solution rests in American indifferentism. If the commercial American is as material as he looks, if common sense is his only good, if his idealism is merely inherited habit, if he responds to two impulses only, restlessness and sentimentality, then he will go over to socialism in its most mechanical phase and, instead of saving the new party, he will ruin it. Potentially the most ardent supporters of a purely materialistic socialism, in which the individual person counts for nothing aside from his appetites, are precisely the “practical” business men who now curse the new order most loudly because it threatens their accumulations. For them it is civil war between seekers for the dollar; and civil war is always the bitterest, and the soonest healed. Such men have been our leaders. Is the army behind them?
I think that the rank and file of bourgeois America are less concerned with wealth and the struggle for wealth than we suppose. I think that they are not so much dazzled by millions as in the ’nineties; more anxious for simplicity of heart, which spells content, and worthiness of aim, which satisfies conscience, than one would guess from Wall Street or Broadway or public life in the Middle West. I think that, while distrusting the economic paradise of the more material socialists, they are closer in sympathy to a thoughtful laborer than to a cynical capitalist. If the religious instinct among them emerges as a disgust for petty emotions, as a passionate interest in humanity, as a willingness to sacrifice privilege and prejudice for a fuller life more generously shared, if the religion of our democracy finds no more expression than this, the crisis will pass. If even thus far indifferentism should yield to active spiritual faith, the bourgeoisie would cease being bourgeois, and we could cease to fear the triumph of the proletariate, since, if there was anything good in our old stock, we could convert them to it.
But if the American has lost his religious instincts, if behind his practical common sense and his vigorous idealism and his eager experiments in spirituality there is nothing but a restless energy working upon the momentum of convictions long dead, then let the new Americans absorb us quickly, for we are worn out.
With all humbleness, with a full realization of the trivialities of hustle and bustle in which we have sunk our religion, with concern for our escape from easy-going optimism and skeptical content, I, for one, feel too sure of the depth of our racial legacy of reverence, and the fundamental religiosity of the American character at its truest, to admit for a moment that conclusion of despair.