ot these
three professors men of culture? Are they not as "spiritual" as any
men of learning you can find in our present-day society?

And now stop for a moment and put yourself in the position of the
young student of the working-class, who goes to these books and
discovers that truth is not truth, but only a bait for a snare. Who
discovers that professors of ethics, practical or impractical, are not
interested in justice among men, but only in collecting funds for
their specialty; that in order to get funds, they are willing to teach
the rich how to paralyze the minds of the poor! Do you wonder that
such young students conclude that #bourgeois# thinkers do not know
what honesty is, but are prostitutes, retainers and lackeys, to be
kicked out of the temple of truth?

#Running the Rapids#

And now, can you form to yourselves a clear concept of what it means
to society that practically all its moral teaching should be in the
hands of men who are incapable of clean, straight thinking? That all
the intellectual prestige of the Church should be lent to the support
of vagueness, futility, and deliberate evasion? Here we are, all of
us, caught in the most terrific social crisis of history; I search for
a metaphor to picture our position, and I recall a canoe-trip in the
wilds of Ontario, hundreds of miles down a long swift river. You sit
in the bow of the canoe, your partner in the stern, watching ahead;
and there comes a slide of smooth green water, and you go over it, and
into a torrent of foaming white, which seizes you and rushes you along
with the speed of a race-horse.

With every sense alert, you watch for the rocks, and when you see one,
you dip your paddle on one side or the other and with a quick motion
draw the canoe clear of the danger. If by any chance you fail to do
it, over you go, and your partner with you, and all your belongings go
down-stream, and maybe you are sucked into a whirlpool, and not seen
for several hours afterwards. Precisely like this is the voyage of
life, for the whole of society and for every individual. The paddle
which would save us from the rocks is experimental science; but in
most of our canoes we put a man who has no paddle, but a Holy Book;
and he casts up his eyes and murmurs words in ancient Greek and
Hebrew, and now and then, when he sees an especially formidable
obstruction--a war, or the gonococcus, or the I.W.W.--he casts a holy
wafer upon the foaming torrent.

*