In the story’s futuristic setting, Earth’s surface is apparently no longer habitable. People live underground and depend on a technological system called “the Machine” to provide them with air to breathe, food to eat, and entertainment. The Machine has grown increasingly complex over the years, to the point that no one truly understands how it works. It seems almost divine in its mystery and power, so most people—including Vashi, the story’s central character—worship it like a deity. The story suggests that this society’s worship of the Machine is rooted in humanity’s innate desire to make sense of the unknown, and that traditional religion may share the same origin: “man […] had once made god in his image.” Similarly, people, having created the Machine, forget that they themselves created it, and now they instead see it as a divine being with complete power over their lives.
Vashi’s rebellious (and, in her opinion, sacrilegious) son Kuno believes that for a society that prides itself on its rationality, the worshippers’ attitude is fundamentally irrational. He’s one of the few people from inside the Machine who’s been to the Earth’s surface and seen the “Homeless” people who live aboveground, free of the Machine—proving that people’s faith in and dependence on the Machine might be misguided. Having had this experience, he puts his faith in people instead, believing that humanity will outlast the Machine. And he’s proven right in the end, as the worshippers’ powerless attitude toward the Machine leaves them vulnerable to the technology they have put their faith into: when the Machine breaks down and nobody knows how to fix it, their entire civilization is destroyed. It’s implied that the Homeless will survive by depending on one another and nature instead of technology, whereas the people living underground ironically die because of their unyielding faith in the Machine that was meant to keep them safe. The story thus suggests that since people create what they worship “in [their own] image” and not the other way around, they are the ones in control. So, they would be better off placing their faith in themselves and one another—what is knowable to them—than in incomprehensible technology or mysterious deities.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Religion and Faith ThemeTracker
Religion and Faith Quotes in The Machine Stops
“I want to see you not through the Machine,” said Kuno. “I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine.”
“Oh, hush!” said his mother, vaguely shocked. “You mustn’t say anything against the Machine.”
“Why not?”
“One mustn’t.”
“You talk as if a god had made the Machine,” cried the other. “I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind.”
“I did not get an Egression-permit.”
“Then how did you get out?”
“I found out a way of my own.”
The phrase conveyed no meaning to her, and he had to repeat it.
“A way of your own?” she whispered. “But that would be wrong.”
“Why?”
The question shocked her beyond measure.
“You are beginning to worship the Machine,” he said coldly. “You think it irreligious of me to have found out a way of my own. It was just what the Committee thought, when they threatened me with Homelessness.”
At this she grew angry. “I worship nothing!” she cried. “I am most advanced. I don’t think you irreligious, for there is no such thing as religion left. All the fear and the superstition that existed once have been destroyed by the machine. I only meant that to find out a way of your own was—Besides, there is no new way out.”
“So it is always supposed.”
“Except through the vomitories, for which one must have an Egression-permit, it is impossible to get out. The Book says so.”
“Well, the Book’s wrong, for I have been out on my feet.”
‘I loosened another tile, and put in my head, and shouted into the darkness: ‘I am coming, I shall do it yet,’ and my voice reverberated down endless passages. I seemed to hear the spirits of those dead workmen who had returned each evening to the starlight and to their wives, and all the generations who had lived in the open air called back to me, ‘You will do it yet, you are coming.’”
“The mortar had somehow rotted, and I soon pushed some more tiles in, and clambered after them into the darkness, and the spirits of the dead comforted me. I don’t know what I mean by that. I just say what I felt. I felt, for the first time, that a protest had been lodged against corruption, and that even as the dead were comforting me, so I was comforting the unborn. I felt that humanity existed, and that it existed without clothes. How can I possibly explain this? It was naked, humanity seemed naked, and all these tubes and buttons and machineries neither came into the world with us, nor will they follow us out, nor do they matter supremely while we are here. Had I been strong, I would have torn off every garment I had, and gone out into the outer air unswaddled. But this is not for me, nor perhaps for my generation. I climbed with my respirator and my hygienic clothes and my dietetic tabloids! Better thus than not at all.”
“The Machine hums! Did you know that? Its hum penetrates our blood, and may even guide our thoughts. Who knows! I was getting beyond its power. Then I thought: ‘This silence means that I am doing wrong.’ But I heard voices in the silence, and again they strengthened me.”
“Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralyzed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it. The Machine develops—but not on our lives. The Machine proceeds—but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscules that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die. Oh, I have no remedy—or, at least, only one—to tell men again and again that I have seen the hills of Wessex as Aelfrid saw them when he overthrew the Danes.”
“The Machine,” they exclaimed, “feeds us and clothes us and houses us; through it we speak to one another, through it we see one another, in it we have our being. The Machine is the friend of ideas and the enemy of superstition: the Machine is omnipotent, eternal; blessed is the Machine.” And before long this allocution was printed on the first page of the Book, and in subsequent editions the ritual swelled into a complicated system of praise and prayer. The word “religion” was sedulously avoided, and in theory the Machine was still the creation and the implement of man. But in practice all, save a few retrogrades worshipped it as divine.
They wept for humanity, those two, not for themselves. […] Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven. Century after century had he toiled, and here was his reward. Truly the garment had seemed heavenly at first, shot with the colours of culture, sewn with the threads of self-denial. And heavenly it had been so long as it was a garment and no more, so long as man could shed it at will and live by the essence that is his soul, and the essence, equally divine, that is his body. The sin against the body—it was for that they wept in chief; the centuries of wrong against the muscles and the nerves, and those five portals by which we can alone apprehend—glozing it over with talk of evolution, until the body was white pap, the home of ideas as colourless, last sloshy stirrings of a spirit that had grasped the stars.
As he spoke, the whole city was broken like a honeycomb. An air-ship had sailed in through the vomitory into a ruined wharf. It crashed downwards, exploding as it went, rending gallery after gallery with its wings of steel. For a moment they saw the nations of the dead, and, before they joined them, scraps of the untainted sky.
