The world is God, and the man who worships it the new pagan. He comes off the same stock as the old pagans, who were called heathens--because they were not Christians. They were, in fact, the classic earth-lovers, and, hence, more truly the sons of God than the crusaders who, directed by an anthropomorphic Deity, tortured and killed them. The new pagan, who not only feels, smells, hears, and sees the earth, but comprehends the established scientific facts about it, finds a keener and larger delight and satisfaction in it than his forefathers could experience. He loves it with his heart and his mind. Having this attitude toward it, he wishes to serve it, prompted by the same motive which actuates him when he serves his immediate father and mother.
Ruskin was sure that his beautiful England was desecrated when steel rails were laid across its green fields and factory smoke contaminated the golden air; he canonized the landscape, and when it changed, his heart ached. He was an artist, not a prophet. The industrialism that he hated disseminated his written appreciations of beauty. Machinery is the extension of man's personality and power; the instrument with which he is realizing the bounties and the Fatherhood of God. At present it is too much an end in itself instead of a means toward nobler results, but tomorrow will see the needed adjustment. Wherefore the new pagan is not saddened but gladdened at the sight of factories and the development of commerce. The awful carnage which commercialism entails is the price which we have been fated to pay for experience. Through commerce we are paving the way for the action of the world-mind--the collective thought of men. Collective thinking precludes socialism as well as individualism, and brings in humanism. The increasing complexity of civilizations symbolizes the enlarged intricacy of human life. Experience and consciousness are expanded by the maze of external detail through which a child in a modern state passes to maturity. The extension of a more highly organized civilization into every habitable region of the earth, and commercial and intellectual communication among all nations, will synthesize the thought of the world. Toward this goal every vital movement is directed, whether consciously or unwittingly. The germ of life was the original leaven, and it will leaven the whole lump. That races and states should disappear does not matter; if human life as a whole were to vanish the birth-labor that the world has begun would be retarded but not abandoned. Man would return in a few billion years. If not, a higher animal would; man himself is on the long way to ever-new heights. He has climbed up out of the sea, and with the birth of reason in his brain he began to ascend into loftier realms. The power of reason is a late acquisition, but it has provided the wondrous banquet at which the modern pagan feasts. It has enabled him literally to soar and revel in high, thin air.