Some of them used to think that they were in revolt merely against contemporary economics. They took out their resentment in damning modern society. From soapboxes, they shouted their message to the working classes, who did not know whether to laugh or get angry. Every college had its socialist club, whose idealist members would have made Karl Marx foam with wrath.
Now they, for the most part, have come to see that their resentment runs deeper and extends more widely. They are in revolt against the complacency, the smugness, the mere carnality of contemporary life. They are demanding that honesty be more highly evaluated than efficiency, truth more highly than materialistic shibboleths. But the fact that they scorn the way of Main Street does not mean that they themselves have anything to offer as a substitute. They have no notion of what is right; they know merely that almost everything that is seems wrong.
Like the somewhat older group led by Messrs. Mencken, Nathan, and the like, they are healthy and hope-inspiring but they have not moved from the cry of revolt to the demand for reconstruction. They insist that man was not made to be the unhappy, timid, and inglorious creature which the twentieth century has left him. These restless youths are the hope of the world. They will not much longer be content with mere negations. As in numbers and intensity of feeling they grow greater, they will, before many years have passed, hit upon some positive solution to life’s problem. Most of them think it will be, when it comes, a brand-new solution. They are mostly, like all young people, too preoccupied with themselves to see mankind in the perspective of history. They do not see that often a rediscovery is the most revolutionary sort of discovery.
At any rate, day by day, there are more of them thinking, even though at present they are but a tiny leaven in the mass of youthful complacency; and day by day they see a little more clearly that man’s ancient pursuit, his inevitable inquisition, is the quest for Truth. He must know why. Even as Christianity offered a new technic in the days of Rome, so it may be again. Christianity can do nothing whatever in a day when men believe in their own intellectual sufficiency. It could do next to nothing for the nineteenth century. In this later era, now that we know, or at least are rapidly learning, that rationally we can arrive Nowhere, now that we perceive that the great gods, Reason, and Activity, and Comfort, all have feet of clay, now that we know not whither to turn to find the way out of a hurly-burly bore, Christianity may do much. It may do everything. But that it may do anything, it is necessary that we perceive, at least a little, what the Christian technic really is.