And God, when He made the world. And Columbus when he discovered
America. And Jesus Christ when He was so happy and so preoccupied over
His vision of a new world, over inventing Christianity, that it seemed a
very small and incidental thing to die on the Cross--He understood.

Wilbur Wright's secret was that he had a vision. His vision was that a
human being could be greater and more powerful than the world had ever
believed before.

Just to be there was a great thought, to be allowed to be one of those
admitted, to be present at the first faint beginning, the first still
alighting of the human spirit from the earth upon the sky. Wilbur Wright
made the most ordinary man a genius a minute. He made him wonder softly
who he was--and the people all about him--who were they? and what would
they think, and what would they do next? The first flash of light on the
wings was a thousand years. It was as if almost for a moment he saw at
last the whole earth about him. History, churches, factories on it,
slipping out of its cocoon at last--its little, old, faded, tied-down
cocoon, and sailing upon the air--sailing with him, sailing with the
churches, with the factories, and with the schools, with History,
through the Invisible, through the Intangible--out to the Sun....

* * * * *

Perhaps the reason that New York was a great city a few minutes the
other day when Wilbur Wright was there was that Wilbur Wright had a new
vision in the presence of all those men of something that they could do.
He touched the imagination of men about themselves. They were profoundly
moved because they saw him in their presence inventing a new kind and