Page:Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West.djvu/38

 intensified, sublimated. It is inherent in the material; and it should inform and illumine and beautify it. True, there is scarcely any evidence of this in the working man of to-day. But his spirituality, which is thought to be dead, is only dormant. And sometimes it betrays itself in a grotesque, spiritual somnambulism. For the working man still goes to church, despite the atheism, expressed or implied, of the two principal agents of his misery—the labor leader and the capitalist. The one in theory, the other in practice are responsible for his spiritual deformity. His leader tells him not to bother, not to worry about his soul; he even doubts its existence. And the capitalist, by his conduct in business and out of business, confirms, gives additional force to the labor leader's advice. For what proof have we, it is often asked nowadays, of the existence of the soul and of the necessity, in consequence, of a soul-ideal? I go neither to metaphysics nor to spiritualism for an answer. To