present emphasis of Things, that we
are making and inspiring all Things except ourselves in a way that would
make the Things glad. The trouble is that Things are getting too glad.
They are turning around and making us. Nearly every man in college is
being made over, mind and body, into a sort of machine. When the college
has finished him, and put him on the market, and one wonders what he is
for, one learns he is to do some very little part, of some very little
thing, and nothing else. The local paper announces with pride that in
the new factory we have for the manufacture of shoes it takes one
hundred and sixty-three machines to make one shoe--one man to each
machine. I ask myself, "If it takes one hundred and sixty-three machines
to make one shoe, how many machines does it take to make one man?"

The Infinite Face of The Street goes by me night and day. To and fro,
its innumerable eyes, always the sound of footsteps in my ears, out of
all these--jostling our shoulders, hidden from our souls, there waits an
All-man, a great man, I know, as always great men wait, whose soul shall
be the signal to the latent hero in us all, who, standing forth from the
machines of learning and the machines of worship, that spread their
noise and network through all the living of our lives, shall start again
the old sublime adventure of keeping a Man upon the earth. He shall
rouse the glowing crusaders, the darers of every land, who through the
proud and dreary temples of the wise shall go, with the cry from
Nazareth on their lips, "Woe unto you ye men of learning, ye have taken
away the key of knowledge, ye have entered not in yourselves and them
that were entering in, ye have hindered," and the mighty message of the
one great scholar of his day who knew a God: "Whether there be
prophecies they shall fail, whether there be tongues they shall cease,
whether there be knowledge it shall vanish away. Though I speak with the
tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding
brass and tinkling cymbal,..."

I do not forget of Him, whose "I, IF I BE LIFTED UP" is the hail of this
modern world, that there were men of letters in those far-off days, when
once He walked with us, who, sounding their brass and tinkling their
cymbals, asked the essentially ignorant question of all outsiders of
knowledge in every age--"How knoweth this man letters, never having
learned?"

As I lay on my bed in the night
They came
Pale wi