Christianity had to wait for something to happen that would lend force
to its Gospel. That something did not occur until the middle of the
fifteenth century. Then, as I have already said without specifying what
they were, a number of unforeseen events took place which opened the
door to the divine bridegroom of humanity.
I have said that in the fifteenth century after Christ a new principle
began to work in society; but I did not say that it was then for the
first time promulgated. Civilization was the organization of man's
mastery over Nature on a basis of self-interest; it was the giving
only so much of wealth and power to the many as was compatible with
the retention of one's own ascendancy. To be civilized, then, is
evidently not to be Christian any more than it is to be Buddhistic or
Judaic, socialistic or democratic. Everybody admits that one can be
civilized and be none of these things: just as one may be "cultured"
without being kind. In other words, it is consistent with being
civilized to be highly selfish; one need only be rationalized in one's
egoism. Indeed, civilization is the incarnation of self-interest. If
self-interest, its basic principle, should give way to social
interest; if the monopoly of social power should be broken and the
power transferred to the general will of the community; if the
community should relegate its administration to representatives, but
should prevent these by some social device from ever usurping the
power entrusted to them, then something new--something as different
from civilization as the airship from the horse-cart--would have begun
to establish itself. A new species of social order can be nothing
other than an order whose basic principle is totally new; and what
greater difference could exist in structuralizing tendencies than that
between self-interest and the interest of the community? Whenever the
latter gets the upper hand, it will be because Fate, the Cosmos, the
Universe, the force within unconscious evolution, has caught up the
song of the _Magnificat_. No such consummation of humanity has taken
place, but it is undeniable that in the fifteenth century the Word
entered like a seed into the soil of Fact. The Virgin's prophecy began
to fulfil itself.
Familiar to everybody, and quickly to be specified, are the wonderful
events which turned the vision into reality. One of these events was
the invention of gunpowder; another was the mariner's compass; a third
was the invention of paper; a fourth, the printing-press; a fifth was
the discovery that the earth goes round the sun once a year, and whirls
on its own axis once a day; a sixth was that indiscretion of
Christopher Columbus, whereby instead of over-populated India he opened
up a way to the vast and sparsely denizened Americas.
These events, each and severally and all together, produced in one
particular the same sort of effect as the use of fire and of the bow
and arrow, of pottery, the domestication of animals, and the smelting
of iron: they enhanced incalculably the mastery of man over matter. But
in the other particular characteristic of civilization they acted in
the very opposite direction from all preceding inventions. Instead of
entrenching the master in his monopoly of social power, instead of
furthering the differentiation of society into master and man, they all
played into the hands of the man. For the first time since the
beginning of human evolution, inventions checked the monopolization of
control over others. But the initiative that now flowed to the
multitude of nobodies was not that puny freedom and narrow scope of
self-realization which the talking ape had enjoyed. It was the
accumulated foresight and control of the universe outside of man which
had been storing itself up more and more for ninety thousand years in
the intellects and wills of the favored few. The floodgates were opened
for the first time in the fifteenth century, and this godlike energy
flowed in among the people at large, so that man, the many, the
multitude, were quickened by it into hope on earth, unto life here and
now, into liberty, creative originality, and the joy of
self-realization.
But it was only the beginning: the effects of the introduction of
gunpowder, the compass, the printing-press and paper, and the new ideas
about the heavens, and the opening-up of relatively uninhabited lands,
were scarcely discernible for two centuries, and then only as a
destructive force. Indeed, for still another hundred years the process
was one chiefly of disintegration. There was taking place a
transference of power from the few to the many; a diffusion of
sovereignty, as well as a redistribution of wealth; and the change was
accompanied by an awakening of the masses to the meaning of the
transformation which they were undergoing. The people began to realize
that the invention of gun-powder had raised the peasant as a fighter to
the level of the armed knight; that the compass and the opening-up of
the Western hemisphere made it possible for the poor to escape from
European masters whom they were unable to vanquish; and that the
cheapness of books was linking the minds of the masses to the sources
of learning and of religious tradition. It cannot but excite our mystic
wonder that for nearly one hundred thousand years every new mastery of
man over physical Nature was such that it inevitably played into the
hands of rulers by strengthening their monopoly of initiative; and that
then, at last, and ever since the fifteenth century after Christ, each
new mechanical invention or discovery has had the unintended and
undesired effect ultimately of scattering among the many the pent-up
power of owners and rulers, and of creating in the many fresh psychic
energy and a new capacity of invention.
This great process of levelling-up took again an enormous leap forward
in the middle of the nineteenth century. The steam-engine advanced it
almost as much as all the fifteenth-century inventions and discoveries
together. The new facilities of travel brought new experiences, and
these, by the psychological law of contrast and novelty, stimulated
intelligence many-fold. The new speed in transportation made it
possible for thousands to escape from oppression where scarcely one had
been able to do so in former generations. The Irish peasants began to
pour into America; then followed the Germans; soon Russians and Latins
were helped to leave the Old World; sometimes in all came a million-odd
in one year. Wealth was multiplied and scattered to a degree that had
never been dreamed to be possible. Not only in the United States, but
in France, Italy, Scandinavia, the British Empire, and South America,
the diffusion of social initiative was taking place. First, power
spread from the few to the many severally; but now, for a quarter of a
century, the many, without surrendering, have been pooling their new
power in the general will of the nation. There, in the unified and
unifying purpose of nations like America, and of each of her federate
States, the power is being safeguarded for the community and for its
members severally by political devices which render public servants
incapable of prolonged usurpation.