In the meantime until we have done this, until we have worked as chemists and airmen work, Christianity is a spirit.

It explains all this eager jumble of the world, brushes away our objections, frees our hearts, gives us our program, makes us know what we are for, to stop and think a moment of this—­that Christianity is a spirit.

Everything that is passing wonderful is a spirit at first.  God begins building a world as a world-spirit, out of a spirit brooding upon the waters.  Then for a long while the vague waters, then for a long while a little vague land or spirit-of-planet before a real world.

And every real belief that man has had, has begun as a spirit.

For two thousand years Man has had the spirit of immortality.  Homer had it.  Homer had moments when improvising his mighty song all alone, of hearing or seeming to hear, faintly, choruses of men’s voices singing his songs after him, a thousand years away.

As he groped his way up in his singing, he felt them in spirit, perhaps, the lonely wandering minstrels in little closed-in valleys, or on the vast quiet hills, filling the world with his voice when he was dead, going about with his singing, breaking it in upon the souls of children, of the new boys and girls, and building new worlds and rebuilding old worlds in the hearts of men.  Homer had the spirit of hearing his own voice forever, but the technique of it, the important point of seeing how the thing could really be done, of seeing how people, instead of listening to imitations or copies or awkward echoes of Homer, should listen to Homer’s voice itself—­the timbre, the intimacy, the subtlety, the strength of it—­the depth of his heart singing out of it.  All this has had to wait to be thought out by Thomas A. Edison.

Man has not only for thousands of years had the spirit of immortality, of keeping his voice filed away if any one wanted it on the earth, forever, but he has had all the other spirits or ghosts of his mightier self.  He has had the spirit of being imperious and wilful with the sea, of faring forth on a planet and playing with oceans, and now he has worked out the details in ocean liners, in boats that fly up from the water, and in boats which dive and swim beneath the sea.  For thousands of years he has had the spirit of the locomotive working through, troops of runners or of dim men groping defiantly with camels through deserts, or sweeping on on horses through the plains, and now with his banners of steam at last he has great public trains of cars carrying cities.

For hundreds of years man has had the spirit of the motor-car—­of having his own private locomotive or his own special train drive up to his door—­the spirit of making every road his railway.  For a great many years he has had the spirit of the wireless telegraph and of using the sky.  Franklin tried using the sky years ago but all he got was electricity.  Marconi knew how better.  Marconi has got ghosts