One set says, “People cannot be converted so we will blow them up.”

The other set says, “We are going to be blown up, so let us put on Plaster of Paris as a garment, we will array ourselves before the Lord in Portland Cement.”

Both of these classes of people believe alike on one main point.

They do not believe in Conversion.

If the conservatives believed in conversion they would not be so afraid that they feel obliged to resort to Portland Cement.  If the radicals believed in conversion they would not be so afraid that they feel obliged to resort to Explosives.

In our machine civilization to these two great standard classes of scared people, there has been added what seems to be a third class—­the people who have responded to a kind of motor spirit in the time, who have modulated a little their unbelief in human nature.  They have substituted for their reinforced concrete Unbelief, a kind of Whirling Unbelief, called machinery.

They admit that in our modern life men are not made of reinforced concrete.  We may move, but we move as wheels move, they tell us.  We arc whirlingly imbedded.  We are cogs and wheels in an Economic Machine.

I would like to consider for a moment this Whirling Unbelief.

There was a time once when I took the Economic Machine very seriously.

I looked up when I went by, at the Economic Machine as the last and the most terrific of the inventions among the machines.  The machine that mocked all the other machines, that made all our machines look pathetic and ridiculous, was the Economic Machine.  There were days when I heard it or seemed to hear it—­this Economic Machine closing in around my life, around all our lives like the last hoarse mocking laugh of civilization.

I said I will love every machine that runs except the Economic Machine—­the machine for making people into machines.

But one day when I had waited or dared to wait, I know not why, a little longer than usual before the Whirling Unbelief, I heard the hoarse mocking laugh die away.  I became very quiet.  I began to think, I reflected on my experiences.  I began to notice things.

I noted that every time I had found myself being discouraged about people, I had caught myself thinking of people as Cogs and Wheels.

Were they really Cogs and Wheels?

Possibly it was merely the easiest, most mechanical-minded thing to do to think of people (with all this machinery around one) as cogs and wheels in an economic machine.

Then it began to occur to me that it was because I had looked upon the economic machine a little lazily, a little innocently that I had been awed and terrific—­and had been swept away with it into the Whirling Unbelief.

Then I stood quietly and calmly for days, for weeks, for years before it.  I watched it Go Round.

I then discovered under close observation that what had looked to me like an economic machine was not an economic machine at all.