490 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
I made mention above of the loud and self proclaiming materialist. 
We hear him and see him everywhere. He is in our real estate offices, 
in the offices of our trust companies, he sits on our railway boards, he 
is among our bankers, on the platforms of our political and socialistic 
gatherings, on our recruiting platforms, in-our pulpits, in our ditches— 
everywhere. She is also in our kitchens. The materialist is every- 
where. And this is a good thing because it is a necessary thing. 
Men and women must be interested in the nfaterial of this life, absorb- 
ingly, entrancingly interested in it. On the northern half of this 
hemisphere men and women must especially be wedded to the interest 
in the material of the earth. We in Canada are young as a nation;_ 
we have often been informed of the fact. We must bind a continent 
to ourselves with hooks of steel. We must hack mountains and dis- 
member streams and seas. Railway systems must be organized, 
transportation facilitated. We must wrestle with the gigantic might 
of prairie seasons and tame their fury to a productive peace. We must 
build houses and skyscrapers and organize industry and make land 
precious. This may seem a blatantly western doctrine. It would 
not consort well with certain Oriental philosophies. But it is the 
doctrine in which we must believe on this continent if we are to save 
our Western souls. It is Christianity itself that would make us thus 
ageressive and optimistic concerning the material. But it is 
Christianity also, carried to its fruition, which would make us call this 
kingdom of the material in which we labour the kingdom of God, 
which would make us see | 
‘“....the traffic of Jacob’s ladder 
Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.” 
and 
‘....Christ walking on the water 
Not of Gennesareth but Thames.” 
Our materialism is right. Always it is right, else why the world 
at all? But we are wrong when we call life itself materialistic, when 
we condense personality and life and spirit down into the sod of the 
real estate agent and leave it there, or vaporize it away with the steam 
of the transcontinental locomotive and let it go there. It is in the 
sod of the real estate agent. It is in the steam of the locomotive. 
But it is elsewhere also. That is the secret to be cherished, without 
which we see no traffic on Jacob’s ladder because we see no ladder. 
Materialism is only dangerous when we allow it to be so, when we 
allow the word to limit us, when we make of the word a millstone 
about our spiritual necks. It is surely quite a proper thing to be 
