e to be created and born on purpose, generation after
generation of them, to listen to a man, two or three thousand years of
them sometimes, on this planet, it is because the man himself when he
spoke felt the need of them--and mentioned it. It is the man who is in
the habit of addressing his remarks to a few continents and to several
centuries who gets them.

I would not dare to say just how or when our next great author on this
earth is going to happen to us, but I shall begin to listen hard and
look expectant the first time I hear of a man who gets up on his feet
somewhere in it and who speaks as if the whole earth were listening to
him. If ever there was an earth that is getting ready to listen, and
to listen all over, it is this one. And the first great man who speaks
in it is going to speak as if he knew it. It is a world which has been
allowed about a million years now, to get to the point where it could
be said to begin to be conscious of being a world at all. And I cannot
believe that a world which for the first time in its history has at
last the conveniences for listening all over, if it wants to, is not
going to produce at the same time a man who shall have something to
say to it--a man that shall be worthy of the first single full
audience, sunset to sunset, that has ever been thought of. It would
seem as if, to say the least, such an audience as this, gathering half
in light and half in darkness around a star, would celebrate by having
a man to match. It would not be necessary for him to fall back,
either, one would think, upon anything that has ever been said or
thought of before. Already even in the sight and sounds of this
present world has the verse of scripture about the next come
true--"Eye hath not seen nor ear heard." It is not conceivable that
there shall not be something said unspeakably and incredibly great to
the first full house the planet has afforded.

I have gone to the place of books. I have seen before this all the
peoples flocking past me under the earth with their little
corner-saviors--each with his own little disc of worship all to
himself on the planet--partitioned away from the rest for thousands of
years. But now the whole face of the earth is changed. No longer can
great men and great events be aimed at it and glanced off on it--into
single nations. Great men, when they come now, can generally have a
world at their feet. It is not possible that we shall not have them.
The whole