Page:Psychology and preaching.djvu/364

 346   PSYCHOLOGY AND PREACHING

are rendered far more dangerous by reason of the human crowding.

In the city one's success or failure seems to depend most directly upon one's fellowmen or upon oneself in competition with one's fellowmen. The gravamen of the economic struggle is competition with men. Of course, the thoughtful man sees nature in the background and perceives that man in his economic efforts is coping with natural forces and processes, and that nature gradually falls under the sway of the human will. The focal point, however, in the economic consciousness of most men is not the collective effort to master the material world, but is their relative participation in the social wealth thus created. And not only the general wealth but the distribution whereby men find their places in the economic gradation of society seems to be very definitely due to a series of human efforts and arrangements. If a man be poor he is likely to feel that his poverty is due largely, at any rate, to conditions and processes which are socially determined, and could be socially changed. If he be rich, he may, like the celebrated Mr. Baer of anthracite coal fame, when his title to control so large a part of the world's natural wealth was challenged, set up the claim that God has committed so much to the rich, because presumably they are the best fitted to administer it wisely; though as a matter of fact such men really attribute the greatness of their accumulations not to God but to their own energy and wisdom, working in a humanly organized economic system which they highly approve. In a word, poverty and riches, success and failure, appear to be the results of personal qualities working in a man-made economic environment. They are not ordained by a super-human power.

The modern man has become accustomed to vast systems of machinery with their mazes of interrelated parts. The machine is, perhaps, the most characteristic feature of our modern civilization. It is the development of the tool; but the tool was a simple instrument which a man used as a sort