Here it confronts every preacher
on the middle aisle of his Sunday morning congregation. We are
continually forgetting this because it is a common fallacy of our
hard-headed and prosperous parishioners to suppose that the vagaries
of philosophers and the maunderings of poets have only the slightest
practical significance. But few things could be further from the
truth. It is abstract thought and pure feeling which are perpetually
moulding the life of office and market and street. It has sometimes
been the dire mistake of preaching that it took only an indifferent
and contemptuous interest in such contemporary movements in literature
and art. Its attitude toward them has been determined by temperamental
indifference to their appeal. It forgets the significance of their
intellectual and emotional sources. This is, then, provincialism and
obtuseness and nowhere are they by their very nature more indefensible
or more disastrous than in the preacher of religion.
Let us turn, then, to those organized expressions of society where
our own civilization is strained the most, where it is nearest to the
breaking point, namely, to our industrial and political order. Let us
ask ourselves if we do not find this naturalistic philosophy regnant
there. That we are surrounded by widespread industrial revolt, that we
see obvious political decadence on the one hand, and a determination
to experiment with fresh governmental processes on the other, few
would deny.
Pages:
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102