It is a very curious phenomenon, this exclusion of Christian ideas from the very area which they created. For all this charity and philanthropy and social service were produced by the ideas of Christianity. And now the fruit says to the vine and to the inward life, “I have no need of thee.” Of course not all the fruit says this. Some of it only says, “Vine and inward life, there is a prejudice against you. You would do well to conceal yourself. I will pretend to be the real thing.” But some of the fruit has gone further. “I am the real thing,” it says. “I know more than James. Faith must not only show works: works are faith. There is no need of metaphysics or creeds. Deeds are religion. The only wealth is tangible wealth, things handled, works seen, bread out of the ground, not down from heaven. Meat that the disciples could not see is too pallid for this earth. Man is his skin and the bag which it contains, and religion must understand this.”
At the same time that this suicidal tendency is operating in the field of man’s highest values seeking to destroy his standards and to discredit the title-deeds of all his greatest treasures, a precisely contrary tendency is acting in commerce and politics, in the field of man’s lower values. While men are busy on the one hand in the effort to materialize the spiritual wealth which Christianity has produced, other men are seeking with a new earnestness to spiritualize our material wealth. As education, science, philanthropy, surrenders the spiritual vision and ideal, trade and politics clutch after it. Never before in the history of the world has there been such an effort as there is to-day to idealize nationalism, to build up spiritual conceptions behind the State, to make racial feeling a religion. If some men think that religious values and spiritual ideas and so-called “metaphysical” notions can be spared from charity and social service, other men are striving with all their might to secure all this rejected mass of vitality and power for patriotism and the national life.
And the same spiritualizing and idealizing tendency is even more evident in commerce and finance. Wealth becomes less and less material. In primitive times riches consisted in flocks and herds and land and in actual gold and silver bullion or coins which their owner put in a crock and buried in his house. Now wealth consists in credit and securities, in figures written on a ledger in a bank, or in scraps of paper in a tin box. The world’s work is done with little visible wealth. Our new banking system is meant for this very purpose, to provide immaterial instrumentalities. Millions of dollars are transported invisibly. By a cable message or a message through the air untold wealth that was in London can be made to appear in New York. And all these intangible forms of wealth are exceeded in the judgment of the late Mr. J. P. Morgan by the credit of character, something still more “metaphysical.” The spiritualization of the material keeps pace on one side with the materialization of the spiritual on the other.
However clear or foggy our ideas on these issues may be now, viewing them as present issues, we cannot fail to see sharply the indisputable facts of the past. Looking backward we simply do not discern and cannot remember the visible and outward values or possessors of values at all. Where is the actual material wealth of earlier days, the flocks, the gold and silver, the palaces? The amazing thing is that it is all gone. The gold and silver which Rome gathered from the world, which went home to Spain in the days of the Conquistadores, where is it all now? Where are those who boasted it and built their fame or power on it? Shelley tells us in his sonnet, “Ozymandias,”
“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said, ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read