University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XXI

THE ACCEPTABLE YEAR OF THE LORD

Without airing my private theology I
earnestly request the most sceptical reader of
this book to assume that miracles in a Biblical
sense have occurred. Let him take it for
granted in the fashion of the strictly æsthetic
commentator who writes in sympathy with a
Fra Angelico painting, or as that great modernist,
Paul Sabatier, does as he approaches
the problems of faith in the life of St. Francis.
Let him also assume, for the length of time
that he is reading this chapter if no longer,
that miracles, in a Biblical sense, as vivid and
as real to the body of the Church, will again
occur two thousand years in the future: events
as wonderful as those others, twenty centuries
back. Let us anticipate that many of these
will be upon American soil. Particularly as
sons and daughters of a new country it is a
spiritual necessity for us to look forward to
traditions, because we have so few from the

past identified with the six feet of black earth
beneath us.

The functions of the prophet whereby he
definitely painted future sublimities have been
too soon abolished in the minds of the wise.
Mere forecasting is left to the weather bureau
so far as a great section of the purely literary
and cultured are concerned. The term prophet
has survived in literature to be applied to men
like Carlyle: fiery spiritual leaders who speak
with little pretence of revealing to-morrow.

But in the street, definite forecasting of
future events is still the vulgar use of the term.
Dozens of sober historians predicted the present
war with a clean-cut story that was carried
out with much faithfulness of detail, considering
the thousand interests involved. They have
been called prophets in a congratulatory secular
tone by the man in the street. These felicitations
come because well-authorized merchants
in futures have been put out of countenance
from the days of Jonah and Balaam till now.
It is indeed a risky vocation. Yet there is
an undeniable line of successful forecasting
by the hardy, to be found in the Scripture and
in history. In direct proportion as these men
of fiery speech were free from sheer silliness,

their outlook has been considered and debated
by the gravest people round them. The heart
of man craves the seer. Take, for instance, the
promise of the restoration of Jerusalem in glory
that fills the latter part of the Old Testament.
It moves the Jewish Zionist, the true race-Jew,
to this hour. He is even now endeavoring
to fulfil the prophecy.

Consider the words of John the Baptist,
"One mightier than I cometh, the latchet of
whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose:
he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and
with fire." A magnificent foreshadowing, being
both a spiritual insight and the statement of
a great definite event.

The heeded seers of the civilization of this
our day have been secular in their outlook.
Perhaps the most striking was Karl Marx, in
the middle of the capitalistic system tracing its
development from feudalism and pointing out
as inevitable, long before they came, such
modern institutions as the Steel Trust and the
Standard Oil Company. It remains to be seen
whether the Marxian prophecy of the international
alliance of workingmen that is obscured
by the present conflict in Europe, and other of
his forecastings, will be ultimately verified.

There have been secular teachers like Darwin,
who, by a scientific reconstruction of the past,
have implied an evolutionary future based on
the biological outlook. Deductions from the
teachings of Darwin are said to control those
who mould the international doings of Germany
and Japan.

There have been inventor-seers like Jules
Verne. In Twenty Thousand Leagues under
the Sea he dimly discerned the submarine.
There is a type of social prophet allied to
Verne. Edward Bellamy, in Looking Backward,
reduced the world to a matter of pressing
the button, turning on the phonograph. It
was a combination of glorified department-store
and Coney Island, on a coöperative basis.
A seventeen-year-old boy from the country,
making his first visit to the Woolworth building
in New York, and riding in the subway when
it is not too crowded, might be persuaded by an
eloquent city relative that this is Bellamy's
New Jerusalem.

A soul with a greater insight is H. G. Wells.
But he too, in spite of his humanitarian heart,
has, in a great mass of his work, the laboratory
imagination. Serious Americans pronounce
themselves beneficiaries of Wells' works,

and I confess myself edified and thoroughly
grateful. Nevertheless, one smells chemicals
in the next room when he reads most of Wells'
prophecies. The X-ray has moved that Englishman's
mind more dangerously than moonlight
touches the brain of the chanting witch.
One striking and typical story is The Food
of the Gods. It is not only a fine speculation,
but a great parable. The reader may prefer
other tales. Many times Wells has gone into
his laboratory to invent our future, in the same
state of mind in which an automobile manufacturer
works out an improvement in his car.
His disposition has greatly mellowed of late, in
this respect, but underneath he is the same
Wells.

Citizens of America, wise or foolish, when
they look into the coming days, have the submarine
mood of Verne, the press-the-button
complacency of Bellamy, the wireless telegraph
enthusiasm of Wells. If they express
hopes that can be put into pictures with definite
edges, they order machinery piled to the skies.
They see the redeemed United States running
deftly in its jewelled sockets, ticking like a
watch.

This, their own chosen outlook, wearies the

imaginations of our people, they do not know
why. It gives no full-orbed apocalyptic joy.
Only to the young mechanical engineer does
such a hope express real Utopia. He can
always keep ahead of the devices that herald
its approach. No matter what day we attain
and how busy we are adjusting ourselves, he
can be moving on, inventing more to-morrows;
ruling the age, not being ruled by it.

Because this Utopia is in the air, a goodly
portion of the precocious boys turn to mechanical
engineering. Youths with this bent are
the most healthful and inspiring young citizens
we have. They and their like will fulfil a
multitude of the hopes of men like Verne,
Bellamy, and Wells.

But if every mechanical inventor on earth
voiced his dearest wish and lived to see it
worked out, the real drama of prophecy and
fulfilment, as written in the imagination of the
human race, would remain uncompleted.

As Mrs. Browning says in Lady Geraldine's
Courtship: —

St. John beheld the New Jerusalem coming
down out of Heaven prepared as a bride adorned
for her husband, not equipped as a touring
car varnished for its owner.

It is my hope that the moving picture
prophet-wizards will set before the world a
new group of pictures of the future. The
chapter on The Architect as a Crusader endeavors
to show how, by proclaiming that
America will become a permanent World's
Fair, she can be made so within the lives of
men now living, if courageous architects have
the campaign in hand. There are other hopes
that look a long way further. They peer as
far into the coming day as the Chinese historian
looks into the past. And then they are
but halfway to the millennium.

Any standard illustrator could give us Verne
or Bellamy or Wells if he did his best. But
we want pictures beyond the skill of any delineator
in the old mediums, yet within the
power of the wizard photoplay producer. Oh
you who are coming to-morrow, show us everyday

America as it will be when we are only
halfway to the millennium yet thousands of
years in the future! Tell what type of honors
men will covet, what property they will still
be apt to steal, what murders they will commit,
what the law court and the jail will be or
what will be the substitutes, how the newspaper
will appear, the office, the busy street.

Picture to America the lovers in her half-millennium,
when usage shall have become
iron-handed once again, when noble sweethearts
must break beautiful customs for the
sake of their dreams. Show us the gantlet
of strange courtliness they must pass through
before they reach one another, obstacles brought
about by the immemorial distinctions of scholarship
gowns or service badges.

Make a picture of a world where machinery
is so highly developed it utterly disappeared
long ago. Show us the antique United States,
with ivy vines upon the popular socialist
churches, and weather-beaten images of socialist
saints in the niches of the doors. Show
us the battered fountains, the brooding universities,
the dusty libraries. Show us houses
of administration with statues of heroes in
front of them and gentle banners flowing from

their pinnacles. Then paint pictures of the
oldest trees of the time, and tree-revering
ceremonies, with unique costumes and a special
priesthood.

Show us the marriage procession, the christening,
the consecration of the boy and girl
to the state. Show us the political processions
and election riots. Show us the people with
their graceful games, their religious pantomimes.
Show us impartially the memorial scenes to
celebrate the great men and women, and the
funerals of the poor. And then moving on toward
the millennium itself, show America after
her victories have been won, and she has grown
old, as old as the Sphinx. Then give us the
Dragon and Armageddon and the Lake of Fire.

Author-producer-photographer, who would
prophesy, read the last book in the Bible,
not to copy it in form and color, but that its
power and grace and terror may enter into you.
Delineate in your own way, as you are led on
your own Patmos, the picture of our land
redeemed. After fasting and prayer, let the
Spirit conduct you till you see in definite line
and form the throngs of the brotherhood of
man, the colonnades where the arts are expounded,
the gardens where the children dance.

That which man desires, that will man
become. He largely fulfils his own prediction
and vision. Let him therefore have a care how
he prophesies and prays. We shall have a tin
heaven and a tin earth, if the scientists are
allowed exclusive command of our highest
hours.

Let us turn to Luke iv. 17.

"And there was delivered unto him the book
of the prophet Esaias. And when he had opened
the book he found the place where it was
written: —

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because
he hath anointed me to preach the Gospel to the
poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted,
to preach deliverance to the captives,
and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at
liberty them that are bruised, to preach the
acceptable year of the Lord.

"And he closed the book, and he gave it
again to the minister, and sat down. And the
eyes of all them that were in the synagogue
were fastened on him. And he began to say
unto them: 'This day is this Scripture fulfilled
in your ears.'

"And all bare him witness, and wondered
at the gracious words which proceeded out

of his mouth. And they said: 'Is not this
Joseph's son?'"

I am moved to think Christ fulfilled that
prophecy because he had read it from childhood.
It is my entirely personal speculation,
not brought forth dogmatically, that Scripture
is not so much inspired as it is curiously and
miraculously inspiring.

If the New Isaiahs of this time will write
their forecastings in photoplay hieroglyphics,
the children in times to come, having seen those
films from infancy, or their later paraphrases
in more perfect form, can rise and say, "This
day is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears." But
without prophecy there is no fulfilment, without
Isaiah there is no Christ.

America is often shallow in her dreams because
she has no past in the European and
Asiatic sense. Our soil has no Roman coin
or buried altar or Buddhist tope. For this
reason multitudes of American artists have
moved to Europe, and only the most universal
of wars has driven them home. Year after
year Europe drained us of our beauty-lovers,
our highest painters and sculptors and the
like. They have come pouring home, confused
expatriates, trying to adjust themselves. It

is time for the American craftsman and artist
to grasp the fact that we must be men enough
to construct a to-morrow that grows rich in
forecastings in the same way that the past of
Europe grows rich in sweet or terrible legends
as men go back into it.

* * * * * *

Scenario writers, producers, photoplay actors,
endowers of exquisite films, sects using special
motion pictures for a predetermined end, all
you who are taking the work as a sacred trust,
I bid you God-speed. Let us resolve that
whatever America's to-morrow may be, she
shall have a day that is beautiful and not
crass, spiritual, not material. Let us resolve
that she shall dream dreams deeper than the
sea and higher than the clouds of heaven,
that she shall come forth crowned and transfigured
with her statesmen and wizards and
saints and sages about her, with magic behind
her and miracle before her.

Pray that you be delivered from the temptation
to cynicism and the timidities of orthodoxy.
Pray that the workers in this your glorious
new art be delivered from the mere lust of the
flesh and pride of life. Let your spirits outflame
your burning bodies.

Consider what it will do to your souls, if
you are true to your trust. Every year,
despite earthly sorrow and the punishment of
your mortal sins, despite all weakness and all
of Time's revenges upon you, despite Nature's
reproofs and the whips of the angels, new visions
will come, new prophecies will come. You
will be seasoned spirits in the eyes of the wise.
The record of your ripeness will be found in
your craftsmanship. You will be God's thoroughbreds.

* * * * * *

It has come then, this new weapon of men,
and the face of the whole earth changes. In
after centuries its beginning will be indeed
remembered.

It has come, this new weapon of men, and
by faith and a study of the signs we proclaim
that it will go on and on in immemorial wonder.