,
sustentation, advancement and procreation of a particular type of one
universal life. These laboratories have all the potentialities of their
respective lives within themselves,--no laboratory, no chemistry; no
chemistry, no life.

What life is, both as to its manifestation and character, is determined
by the form of organization through which force, all there is of life,
becomes a particular and differentiated vital phenomenon. This is as
true of states and churches as it is of trees and men, for a church or a
state is a vital phenomenon as really so as a tree or a man.

The trouble with every reformatory socialism of modern times is that it
undertakes the impossibility of changing the fruit of the capitalistic
state into that of the communistic one, without changing the political
organism; but to do that is as impossible as to gather grapes from
thorns or figs from thistles. Hence an uprooting and replanting are
necessary (a revolution not a reformation) which will give the world a
new tree of state.

Capitalism no longer grows the fruits (foods, clothes and houses) which
are necessary to the sustenance of the world. Hence it encumbers the
ground and must be dug up by the roots in order that a tree which is so
organized that it will bear these necessities may be planted in its
place.

The people of Russia have accomplished this uprooting and replanting
(this revolution) in the case of their state, and those of every nation
are destined to do the same in one way or another, each according to its
historical and economic development, some perhaps with violence, most, I
hope, peaceably. The Russian Bolsheviki occupy the highest peak in man's
history; and while they stand, the world will be safe for industrial
democracy. This democracy is the tree of life whose fruits are for the
sustenance of the nations and whose very leaves are for their healing.

The only lives of which we need know aught are those that we shall live
in our bodies by chemical processes and in the race by conscious or
unconscious influences; for, if there is another, it will take care of
itself, if we take care of these.

Since, therefore, all life is on a level and since morality, religion
and Christianity are but manifestations of it, do you not see how
profoundly and incontrovertibly true is my levelism?

According to this levelism all interpretations of Christianity
(protestant and catholic--congregational, presbyterian, episcopalian and