in the desert. You can telephone with a
telephone; you cannot do anything else with it. And though this is
one of the wildest joys of life, it falls by one degree from its full
delirium when there is nobody to answer you. The contention is, in
brief, that you must pull up a hundred roots, and not one, before you
uproot any of these hoary and simple expedients. It is only with great
difficulty that a modern scientific sociologist can be got to see that
any old method has a leg to stand on. But almost every old method has
four or five legs to stand on. Almost all the old institutions are
quadrupeds; and some of them are centipedes.

Consider these cases, old and new, and you will observe the operation of
a general tendency. Everywhere there was one big thing that served six
purposes; everywhere now there are six small things; or, rather (and
there is the trouble), there are just five and a half. Nevertheless, we
will not say that this separation and specialism is entirely useless or
inexcusable. I have often thanked God for the telephone; I may any
day thank God for the lancet; and there is none of these brilliant and
narrow inventions (except, of course, the asbestos stove) which might
not be at some moment necessary and lovely. But I do not think the most
austere upholder of specialism will deny that there is in these old,
many-sided institutions an element of unity and universality which
may well be preserved in its due proportion and place. Spiritually,
at least, it will be admitted that some all-round balance is needed to
equalize the extravagance of experts. It would not be difficult to carry
the parable of the knife and stick into higher regions. Religion, the
immortal maiden, has been a maid-of-all-work as well as a servant
of mankind. She provided men at once with the theoretic laws of an
unalterable cosmos and also with the practical rules of the rapid and
thrilling game of morality. She taught logic to the student and told
fairy tales to the children; it was her business to confront the
nameless gods whose fears are on all flesh, and also to see the streets
were spotted with silver and scarlet, that there was a day for wearing
ribbons or an hour for ringing bells. The large uses of religion have
been broken up into lesser specialities, just as the uses of the hearth
have been broken up into hot water pipes and electric bulbs. The romance
of ritual and colored emblem has been taken over by that narrowest of
all