he vestibule trains shall say deeper things than sermons
say. In the rhythm of the anthem of them singing along the rails, we
shall find again the worship we have lost in church, the worship we
fain would find in the simpered prayers and paid praises of a thousand
choirs,--the worship of the creative spirit, the beholding of a
fragment of creation morning, the watching of the delight of a man in
the delight of God,--in the first and last delight of God. I have made
a vow in my heart. I shall not enter a pulpit to speak, unless every
word have the joy of God and of fathers and mothers in it. And so long
as men are more creative and godlike in engines than they are in
sermons, I listen to engines.

Would to God it were otherwise. But so it shall be with all of us. So
it cannot but be. Not until the day shall come when this wistful,
blundering church of ours, loved with exceeding great and bitter love,
with all her proud and solitary towers, shall turn to the voices of
life sounding beneath her belfries in the street, shall she be
worshipful; not until the love of all life and the love of all love is
her love, not until all faces are her faces, not until the face of the
engineer peering from his cab, sentry of a thousand souls, is
beautiful to her, as an altar cloth is beautiful or a stained glass
window is beautiful, shall the church be beautiful. That day is bound
to come. If the church will not do it with herself, the great rough
hand of the world shall do it with the church. That day of the new
church shall be known by men because it will be a day in which all
worship shall be gathered into her worship, in which her holy house
shall be the comradeship of all delights and of all masteries under
the sun, and all the masteries and all the delights shall be laid at
her feet.

VI

PROPHETS

The world follows the creative spirit. Where the spirit is creating,
the strong and the beautiful flock. If the creative spirit is not in
poetry, poetry will call itself something else. If it is not in the
church, religion will call itself something else. It is the business
of a living religion, not to wish that the age it lives in were some
other age, but to tell what the age is for, and what every man born in
it is for. A church that can see only what a few of the men born in an
age are for, can help only a few. If a church does not believe in a
particular man more than he believes in himself, the less it tries to
do for