“LOSSES OF MODERN PROGRESS.”
The greatest progress the world has made in these last days is in the line of discovery, modern invention, and chemistry. There have also come to this generation many blessings in the wider diffusion of knowledge, in new activities of Christianity. And yet the religion of the day is far below that of Jesus Christ. Its philosophy is largely borrowed from the pagans. Its politics falls below that of other times, and nearly parallels ancient Rome’s at its worst. Even its invention of labor-saving machinery proves, in many respects, a curse to the laboring class, instead of a blessing. In a recent sermon in Grace Episcopal Church, San Francisco, Bishop Henry C. Potter spoke as follows: We, who are citizens of the United States of America, are in the habit of pluming ourselves on the fact that a great deal that was vicious and narrow and intolerant in the civilization of earlier ages has been dismissed. We speak of feudalism, for instance, with a great scorn. There were fixed social orders and classes in those days; there was a construction of human society which set a man in one place at his birth, and kept him there until his death. And as we remember and remind ourselves of the enormous social contrasts in these particulars which distinguish our modern civilization primarily in this land from that in other countries, we rejoice because we are free from the servitudes of this older civilization, and that the order of feudal society has ceased and perished forever. But the order of feudal society, whether you and I choose to recognize that fact, was the order in which the rich and poor sat at the same table and ate from the same board. Whether the serf or the servant was below or above, he ate with his master in the same room, of the same viands, under the same roof, in the same presences. When you come to reflect upon the enormous changes in our modern life, have you ever realized the vast change which has come to pass in human society under the old and what we call the new system? We have dismissed out of our own lives the responsibilities of the old system; we have lost out of them their gracious benignity. We have come to a condition, especially under democratic forms of government, when because there is no fixed order; when because the ignorant man of to-day may be the ruler of to-morrow; when, because in all the organization of human society as we know it in the great centers, we have thrown overboard, so to speak, every tradition that belonged whether to absolutism or feudalism—we reckon ourselves to have achieved the highest triumph, not only in the formation of human government, but in the constitution of human society. It is worth while for our Christian people to stop and ask themselves occasionally what this modern progress of ours has lost, as well as what is the gain for us. We remember with constantly increasing complacency the triumphs of our vast industrial institutions. At no public meeting do public orators come together without the exaltation of that genius for invention which has governed the world with these modern contrivances of mechanism, which has cheapened so many productions and multiplied so many comforts and luxuries. I would not disparage gains of that sort, but I wonder if you and I have realized at what price they are purchased. The Price Paid for Modern Invention.
One hundred years ago, in England the weaver who wove the cloth that his master wore, wore it in his own house, on his own property, and with wool which was his own purchase. But when invention and science had given the world these things, domestic industrial life was banished thereafter. That would have been a serious consideration enough, but there came in upon it the modern mills, treating and dealing with the great masses of work people as only so many animated machines. If the modern manager of a mill were asked to-morrow whether he knew the hands that worked in his mill, he would look at the person who proposed such an inquiry with something of curiosity, and a good deal more of contempt. Know four or five hundred or a thousand men? How could he know them? How could he know anything about them? How could he touch their hands, eat and drink with them in their own homes? The idea is too grotesque to be conceived! Modern invention, which men exalt, glorify, and worship, is, in unconsecrated hands, divisive and ignobling in its tendency. It might be different if the purpose of its use was to help the needy. It is used, however, to the profit of the few. No mere knowledge of invention, nor science, nor art, nor discovery, will regenerate the world. Only the Gospel of God can do this. Without righteousness, all else, however brilliant, is failure—utter failure.