The Voice of the Machines | Page 9

and bound it round on every side. The idealism and passion and
devotion and poetry in an engineer, in the feeling he has about his
machine, the power with which that machine expresses that feeling, is
one of the great typical living inspirations of this modern age, a
fragment of the new apocalypse, vast and inarticulate and far and faint
to us, but striving to reach us still, now from above, and now from

below, and on every side of life. It is as though the very ground itself
should speak,--speak to our poor, pitiful, unspiritual, matter-despising
souls,--should command them to come forth, to live, to gaze into the
heart of matter for the heart of God. It is so that the very dullest of us,
standing among our machines, can hardly otherwise than guess the
coming of some vast surprise,--the coming of the day when, in the very
rumble of the world, our sons and daughters shall prophesy, and our
young men shall see visions, and our old men shall dream dreams. It
cannot be uttered. I do not dare to say it. What it means to our religion
and to our life and to our art, this great athletic uplift of the world, I do
not know. I only know that so long as the fine arts, in an age like this,
look down on the mechanical arts there shall be no fine arts. I only
know that so long as the church worships the laborer's God, but does
not reverence labor, there shall be no religion in it for men to-day, and
none for women and children to-morrow. I only know that so long as
there is no poet amongst us, who can put himself into a word, as this
man, my brother the engineer, is putting himself into his engine, the
engine shall remove mountains, and the word of the poet shall not; it
shall be buried beneath the mountains. I only know that so long as we
have more preachers who can be hired to stop preaching or to go into
life insurance than we have engineers who can be hired to leave their
engines, inspiration shall be looked for more in engine cabs than in
pulpits,--the vestibule trains shall say deeper things than sermons say.
In the rhythm of the anthem of them singing along the rails, we shall
find again the worship we have lost in church, the worship we fain
would find in the simpered prayers and paid praises of a thousand
choirs,--the worship of the creative spirit, the beholding of a fragment
of creation morning, the watching of the delight of a man in the delight
of God,--in the first and last delight of God. I have made a vow in my
heart. I shall not enter a pulpit to speak, unless every word have the joy
of God and of fathers and mothers in it. And so long as men are more
creative and godlike in engines than they are in sermons, I listen to
engines.
Would to God it were otherwise. But so it shall be with all of us. So it
cannot but be. Not until the day shall come when this wistful,
blundering church of ours, loved with exceeding great and bitter love,

with all her proud and solitary towers, shall turn to the voices of life
sounding beneath her belfries in the street, shall she be worshipful; not
until the love of all life and the love of all love is her love, not until all
faces are her faces, not until the face of the engineer peering from his
cab, sentry of a thousand souls, is beautiful to her, as an altar cloth is
beautiful or a stained glass window is beautiful, shall the church be
beautiful. That day is bound to come. If the church will not do it with
herself, the great rough hand of the world shall do it with the church.
That day of the new church shall be known by men because it will be a
day in which all worship shall be gathered into her worship, in which
her holy house shall be the comradeship of all delights and of all
masteries under the sun, and all the masteries and all the delights shall
be laid at her feet.

VI
PROPHETS
The world follows the creative spirit. Where the spirit is creating, the
strong and the beautiful flock. If the creative spirit is not in poetry,
poetry will call itself something else. If it is not in the church, religion
will call itself something else. It is the business of a living religion, not
to wish that the age it lives in were some other age, but to tell what the
age is for, and what every man born in