s a club; and if he wants to be very sure, he
calls a convention. From the National Undertakers' Association and the
Launderers' League to the Christian Endeavour Tournament and the World's
Congress--the Midway Pleasance of Piety--the Convention strides the
world with vociferousness. The silence that descends from the hills is
filled with its ceaseless din. The smallest hamlet in the land has
learned to listen reverent from afar to the vast insistent roar of It,
as the Voice of the Spirit of the Times.

Every idea we have is run into a constitution. We cannot think without a
chairman. Our whims have secretaries; our fads have by-laws. Literature
is a club. Philosophy is a society. Our reforms are mass meetings. Our
culture is a summer school. We cannot mourn our mighty dead without
Carnegie hall and forty vice-presidents. We remember our poets with
trustees, and the immortality of a genius is watched by a standing
committee. Charity is an Association. Theology is a set of resolutions.
Religion is an endeavour to be numerous and communicative. We awe the
impenitent with crowds, convert the world with boards, and save the lost
with delegates; and how Jesus of Nazareth could have done so great a
work without being on a committee is beyond our ken. What Socrates and
Solomon would have come to if they had only had the advantage of
conventions it would be hard to say; but in these days, when the
excursion train is applied to wisdom; when, having little enough, we try
to make it more by pulling it about; when secretaries urge us,
treasurers dun us, programs unfold out of every mail--where is the man
who, guileless-eyed, can look in his brother's face; can declare upon
his honour that he has never been a delegate, never belonged to
anything, never been nominated, elected, imposed on, in his life?

Everything convenes, revolves, petitions, adjourns. Nothing stays
adjourned. We have reports that think for us, committees that do right
for us, and platforms that spread their wooden lengths over all the
things we love, until there is hardly an inch of the dear old earth to
stand on, where, fresh and sweet and from day to day, we can live our
lives ourselves, pick the flowers, look at the stars, guess at God,
garner our grain, and die. Every new and fresh human being that comes
upon the earth is manufactured into a coward or crowded into a machine
as soon as we get at him. We have already come to the point where we do
not expect to