So, again, as regards the religious life. Men trained by the mechanical occupations to materialistic, industrial habits of thought are beset with a growing inability to appreciate, or even to apprehend, the meaning of religious appeals that proceed on the old-fashioned grounds of metaphysical validity. The consolations of a personal relation (of subservience) to a supernatural master do not appeal to men whose habit of life is shaped by a familiarity with the relations of impersonal cause and effect, rather than by relations of personal dominance and fealty. It does not come as a matter of course for such men to give the catechism's answer to the question, What is the chief end of man ? Nor
360 THE THBORT Or BCSIKSSS EKTESPBISB
do they instiiicUvely feel themfelves to be Binnen by virtue of a congenital, hereditary taint or obfiqnity. Indeed, they c^i on]y with great difficalt]r be seriously persuaded that they are sinnera at alL They are in danger of losing the point of view of sin. The relatjon of status or fealty involved in the concept of sin is becoming alien to thdr habit of mind. They are therefore slow to realize that their past life has violated such a relation of fealty, on the one hand, and that it is of vital consequence to reestabli^ such a relation of status by a work of salvation or redemption. The kindly ministrations of the church and the clergy grate on the sensibilities of men so trained, as being so much ado about nothing. The machine, their master, is no respecter of persons and knows neither morality nor dignity nor prescriptive right, divine or human ; its teaching is training them into insensibility of the whole range of concepts on which these ministrations proceed.^
Not alone in the direction of growth given to
vulgar sentiment and to the vulgar insight into
facts is the matter-of-fact discipline of the machine