But I have since travelled over a great part of that way—the long, long way, let us not forget, by which we have come out of captivity—and I found that, while the barbed-wire entanglements have been cleared from most of the fields and the trenches had been filled, the entanglements, suspicion and hate, were still keeping nations apart, even without guns and bombs and poisonous gas.
I was the first American to make the journey across Asia Minor after the Armistice. Starting from the vicinity of the Tower of Babel, which stood amid “the whole earth of one language and one speech,” and which sought to reach the heaven until the builders were suddenly unable to understand one another’s speech and were dispersed, gibbering and gesticulating and quarrelling, over the earth—starting from the neighborhood of that Scriptural memory, I travelled for days through homeless misery and physical want and mental hate, which I felt were but the sequelæ of the world disease, and would soon pass. But conditions are, if anything, worse than when I passed that way. It is only the mercy and ennobling philanthropy of Americans that are preventing the extermination or degradation of a race.
But I have more lately travelled over nearer sections of that long way back to the cradle of the race and of Christian civilization. Within the year I have walked, or ridden by ship or train or airplane, all the way from the west coast of Ireland to the then closed door of Russia and along its then impenetrable western wall down to Hungary and back. Alas! the separating, the estranging hatreds are still there.
Barriers and entanglements, visible and invisible, were upon every border all the way across Europe. Unspeakable inconveniences, often hardships, had to be endured by the ordinary traveller in these zones of suspicion and antipathy and hate, till I came to think of the countries they separated as the “United Hates of Europe.”
What I wish to bring out of this all is not our local obligations, our interstate and intranational obligations, but our world obligations, which we share with others—the obligations to see that all the children of the earth have a chance to escape from those hatreds into the best things of the race as a whole.
In my mid-European travels I came one day to the country where Copernicus had developed the new theory of the universe. There I had an experience which lifted my thought into the broader view which ignored barriers and entanglements. It was a journey in an airplane that rose high above boundaries and connected Warsaw with Prague and Strasbourg and Paris. It was the morning of Pentecost Day that I made the journey—the day which celebrates the coming together of people from many nations and their understanding one another and being understood because of the cloven tongues that descended upon them. As we flew over the prairies of Poland that beautiful, clear spring Sunday morning, I could see the shadow of the plane as of a cloven tongue flying beneath us from village to village, and even over the disputed territory of Upper Silesia. This was the symbolic prophecy of the new sort of understanding, the unifying fabric woven by such shuttles that must by their woof replace the separating entanglement of suspicion and hatred if Europe, and so the world, is to survive something worse than fire or flood.[1]
Before I began the airplane journey from Warsaw I went to take my last look at the statue of Copernicus, whose conception of a heliocentric universe is the capital event in modern thought. At the foot of the Vosges Mountains, which I crossed a day or two later into France, there is the little village of St. Dié, where, in a book on the Ptolemaic System, the name America was first put on the printed page, and on a world map. America was baptized into the Ptolemaic cosmos, but its inhabitants (after the aborigines) dwelt from the first in a Copernican universe, wanderers in an infinity of space, “with a shuddering sense of physical immensity.”
Europe could not readily forget the geography of its infancy and childhood and maturity, but America began its God-fearing settlement with an astronomy of infinite distances, with a cosmography in which it was itself infinitesimal, and with a geography partaking of the sky, as well as of the sea and land.
With this Copernican consciousness of the universe, America should be the least provincial, and Americans the most “universe-minded” of all the inhabitants of the earth.
Isolate we have indeed been as a people, but not provincially nor narrowly nor proudly isolate. We kept out of the partisan Ptolemaic concerns of Europe, but when the freedom of mankind was threatened, America’s policies leaped to the world horizon of her interest in humanity. Our America has had from the first a cosmic view, a concern for all mankind. “All men” are included in its national creed. It is only those who would narrow our horizon of sympathy and bring a Ptolemaic sky over our heads again that it has in its doctrine excluded.