The excellent thing about modernity is all the storage space. Things can sit around for decades and still be brought out brushed off and considered again. In Gray's poem "Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard" he writes:

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd,
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre...

Last night, TVO played the 1960 film Elmer Gantry filmed before I was born but never making a dent in my consciousness other than the familiar name. But there is was and there they were. A young Shirley Jones looking not very much like Mrs. Partridge in her wardrobe of various thin slips. Burt Lancaster with the Cosmo Kramer hair. The film was about evangelicalism in the late 1920s American mid-west but it was really about the control of information. As such it was a useful cautionary tale for today. The information, the evangelical message, is conveyed by song, preaching, train, tent rally, newspapers, telephones, radio, telegrams and even Gestetner. But for all that, for all the modern successes of communication, the substance of the message is never truly known or expressed consistently...as is right for a matter of faith. It reminded me of the internet, the promise of knowledge and the practice of disorganized over-informing. Unauthoritative information overload following hype. In the end the two skeptics, the evangelical Elmer on one side and his agnostic, probing and objective newpaper pal are stronger but still only where they were when the whole thing started.