Article September 26, 1925 Issue

Signs of the Times

with contributions from Gaius Glenn Atkins, Abraham Lincoln, Archdeacon Fotheringham, A. T. Pike, Ernst Jonson

[From an article by Gaius Glenn Atkins, in the Christian Century, Chicago, Illinois]

Dr. Jacks is teaching his English-speaking world to distinguish between civilizations of culture and civilizations of power. He is urging what the clear-visioned have always urged: that civilizations of power carry the elements of their own undoing, engendering wearing and finally tragic competitions; while civilizations of culture create a commonwealth of imponderable goods which grow richer as they are shared. Here are the alternatives we face, and the road we choose will finally define Americanism. A portentous drive of forces is urging us toward a civilization of power. If we are minded to take that road, we have in possession, or prospect, everything that power can offer,—wealth, numbers, organizing genius, splendor of material form, the last word in the mechanism of comfort and luxury,—all the kingdoms of this world. And yet all this might not save us from finding at the end of that road the disillusionments and final eclipse which have attended every civilization of power since history began.

If we should shift our concern from the establishment and development of a civilization of power of the enrichment and ripening of a civilization of culture,—meaning by culture not books and arts and the like, but the realization amongst us of the highest human values,—we should be answering the question, "What is Americanism?" not in terms of historic analysis or contemporaneous criticism, but in terms of the release of our whole pregnant force in the direction of a life of the spirit and the good of humanity. In a sentence, we need to-day a deeper self-understanding, and the will and the wisdom to give a happier direction to all our tremendous national force.

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