Daily Inspiration Quote by Emily Greene Balch

Balch’s sentence wears the polite coat of a surveyor, but it’s really an argument about what counts as “history.” The phrase “tendencies making for a new world” signals the early-20th-century faith in direction: the belief that modernity isn’t just change, it’s change with an arrow. By inserting “we must not forget,” she’s quietly scolding the technocrats of her era who could tally industrial output and geopolitical shifts while treating religion as leftover folklore. Her intent is corrective: any serious inventory of world-making forces has to include what people worship, fear, and hope.

The subtext is strategic. Balch doesn’t claim one faith is winning; she frames “religious or spiritual thinking and feeling” as a shared human domain. “Thinking and feeling” pairs doctrine with emotion, making spirituality legible to educators and reformers who might distrust creeds but recognize moral psychology. Then comes the key phrase: “a strong unifying trend.” That’s not naive kumbaya; it’s an attempt to locate solidarity beneath sectarian conflict. In the shadow of world war and nationalist fervor, unity is a political aspiration smuggled in as cultural observation.

Context matters: Balch, a peace advocate and internationalist, is writing from a moment when “new world” talk could mean utopian cooperation or mechanized catastrophe. Her rhetoric chooses the optimistic register while hedging with “tendencies” rather than guarantees. The line works because it reframes spirituality as infrastructure for global belonging, not merely private belief, and insists that the future will be built as much by conscience as by policy.