In my Commonplace...

"It (another movement of thought today) is the steadily growing consciousness that progress can never be measured in terms of mechanism or materialism. To pile up money, to build empires, to cross the world by aeroplane, to wrest Nature's secrets from her and make them serve our comfort and convenience in a thousand different ways--all these things count for next to nothing if meanwhile there is little or no advance in things of the spirit. We live at the close of a century of amazing mechanical triumph; we can achieve things, in the region of applied science, at which our grandfathers would have gasped; and the total result seems to be that the world's body has outgrown it's soul.
What is the good of all our science if we only harness it to hate and the forces of destruction? What is the good of a whole world of enormously successful business and mechanism and organization and applied science if, instead of mastering these things, we are mastered by them? Many are asking these questions today in all seriousness; and many others, apparently absorbed in pleasure or money-making, are dimly aware of such thoughts just below their consciousness. The truth is we are not yet big enough to master our altered world; 'the world is new, and we have only one way to meet it: we must become new men.'"  ​E.S. Woods (1922), Everyday Religion