I have tried to see a way out.  Why should it be so?

I have seen that the foundries, the ocean liners, and the airships are in the hands of men who say How.

Perhaps we will take goodness and cathedrals, very soon now, and put them for a while in the hands of the men who say how.  If St. Francis, for instance, to-day, were to be suddenly more like Bessemer, or if Dr. Henry Van Dyke were more like Edison or if the Reverend R.J.  Campbell were more like Sir Joseph Lister or if the Bishop of London were to go at London the way Marconi goes at the sky, what would begin to happen to goodness?  One likes to imagine what would happen if that same spirit, the spirit of “how” were brought to bear upon a great engineering enterprise like goodness in this world.

Perhaps the spirit of “how” is the spirit of God.

Perhaps religion in the twentieth century is Technique.

Technique in the twentieth century is the Holy Ghost.

Technique is the very last thing that has been thought of in religion.  Religion is being converted before our eyes.  It is becoming touched with the temper of science, with the thoroughness, the doggedness, the inconsolableness of science until it is seeing how and until it is saying how.

When the inventors, in our machine age, get to work on goodness in the way that they are getting to work on other things, things will begin to happen to goodness that the vague, sweet saints of two thousand years have never dreamed of yet.

In London and New York, in this first quarter of the twentieth century Christianity will not be put off as a spirit.  The right of Christianity to be a spirit has lapsed.

Christianity is a Method.

What Christ meant when He said He was the Truth and the Life, has been understood, on the whole, very well.  What He meant by saying He was the Way, we are now beginning, to work out.

* * * * *

A thousand or two years ago, when two men stood by the roadside and made a bargain, it was their affair.

When two men stand on the sidewalk now and make a bargain, say in New York, they have to deal and to deal very thoughtfully and accurately with ninety million people who are not there.  They do this as well as they can by imagining what the ninety million people would do and say, and how they would like to be done by, if they were there.

The facilities for finding out what the ninety million people would do and say, and what they would want, the general conveniences for assuring the two men on the sidewalk that they will be able to conduct their bargain, and to get the other ninety million in, accurately, that they will be able to do by them as they would be done by—­these have scarcely been arranged for yet.

In our machine age, with our railroads, and our telephones suddenly heaping our lives up on one another’s lives, almost before we have noticed it, our religious machinery to go with our other machinery, our machinery that we are going to be Christians with, has not been invented yet.