Self - sufficient Man

Undaunted, therefore, by the human toll in death and de­struction that spelled caution, the Western dream was most dramatically expressed in the Great Exhibition of 1851. This exposition, for which the historic Crystal Palace was built in London, presaged the scientific triumphs that would define the march of the West into the future.

Hailing this occasion, the Edinburgh Review declared the accumulation of inventive genius under one roof as mankind's opportune moment: "to seize the living scroll of human progress, inscribed with every successive conquest of man's intellect." Historian John Warwick Montgomery insightfully draws attention to the most representative exhibit in the Crystal Palace, the model of a train that laid its own track. This curiosity symbolized the then existent mind-set, not just scientifically but philosophically, as mankind was on the move with built-in durability. In a very real sense a new road was being built to redefine the destination. This would be the classic "City of Man":

The train that laid its own track can be regarded as the arch symbol of the 19th century mind: the horizontal equivalent of pulling oneself to heaven by one's own bootstraps. For a train to have any advantage over an ordinary conveyance, its tracks must be so firmly anchored independent of the train-that the train can build up great speed while safely relying on their -stability A train that lays its own track and takes it up again would have no superiority over a vehicle not running on tracks at all, for its tracks would be no more solidly anchored than the train itself. This was the 19th century: trying to lay its own tracks through technological inventiveness, achieving only pseudo-stability, and blind to the crash that will inevitably destroy all individual and societal engineers who refuse to let Christ provide a stable track for their lives.

The self-contained train was the metaphor of self­-sufficient man. The built-in capacity of power and provision, of overpowering and undergirding, was the envisioned Real­ity ahead. From that day to this, pragmatism has been the handmaiden of secularized living: "We can do it."

Extracted from Ravi Zacharias’ Deliver Us From Evil.