follows that these moods may confront one another dramatically both in individual life and in the history of society. There is a party of theory and a party of belief, with a loyalty to each. It may be that in our own time, for example, there is more need of emphasizing the motive of belief. We live in a rationalistic age, many of us in a rationalistic fellowship or community, and incline to the party of theory. It is the mark of such partisanship to suppose that advocates of established belief are moved to suspect or resist innovation only by stubbornness or inertia. On the contrary, conservatism is not less passionate than radicalism, nor less moved by the love of good. For the advocate of established belief is the advocate of established life; of that present adjustment of interests which is daily tested and proved, and to which the great majority of men are wholly and irrevocably committed. It is less enlightened to despise him as the enemy of truth than to pay him some respect as the friend of peace and order. of Belief § 4. We shall not understand the strength of the motive of belief, or the part which it plays in the vital economy, The Solidarity until we recognize its corporate character. An established belief possesses a value proportional to the number of interest invested in it. And this solidarity of belief manifests itself on every scale, individual, social, and historical. It has been said that every man of action is a fatalist. This is due to the need of a permanence of belief, if the several acts of an individual life are to contribute to one end. A plan of action, in proportion to its scope, requires time and manifold agencies for its execution, and must be adhered to from moment to moment and from act to act. Every plan of action is based on innumerable assumptions concerning the natural and social environment; and if these assumptions be questioned, the plan is virtually suspended. Action is efficient in proportion to its range, and the greater its range the more necessary is it that its components should be rigid and stable. Assumptions must be trusted implicitly in order that one may be free to leave them behind one's back and face the work to be done. The larger the enterprise, the greater the need of a fixed orientation, of a view that shall not dissolve until a thousand tributary agencies have been assembled, coördinated, and made jointly and cumulatively to achieve the designated end. It follows that a steadiness of belief is more indispensable to social than to individual action. Every variety of coöperation requires that men shall occupy common ground. The best partners, like the best friends, are those who can take the most for granted. That which is true of every lesser social enterprise is supremely true of politics and religion. The arm of society is the institution, and this owes its power to a wide-spread community of belief. The institution is the most delicate and complicated mechanism of life, constructed out of the purposes and convictions of innumerable individuals. And this mechanism cannot remain intact, and be the instrument that it is designed to be, unless the parts be firm and durable. In short, society could not act, for the maintenance of order or the promotion of civilization, if men's ideas were fluent and transitory. This does not mean merely that social action would be hampered, but that any political or organized community whatsoever would be impossible. Unbelief is equally fatal to the full benefit of religion. That benefit is realized only when a firm conviction concerning the ultimate source of human fortune, or the supreme object of devotion, dominates and unifies all the varied activities of life. This benefit is never fully attained; but so far as it has been attained, it has given to civilization something of the sweetness and vigor of health. When science and art, common sense and mystical ecstasy, the outer manner and the inner propensity, in all men different and yet in all alike, do but embroider and enact one theme, the circle is closed and the strength of man made perfect. And such unanimity of imagination and enthusiasm, quickening and ennobling the concert of action, must rest on unseen but deep-laid foundations of common belief. There remains one further proof of the solidarity of belief. If society is to act effectively, it must remain in agreement with itself not only breadthwise but also lengthwise. The temporal continuity of civilization is the indispensable condition of progress. When fundamental convictions are altered, it is much like moving to a new planet; the work must be begun all over again. Apparently the conquests of civilization are gained by swift and sudden victories. But revolution is only the beginning of reformation. It is the slow process of reorganization and education that saves the fruits of such victories, and constitutes that steady if almost imperceptible advance on which the hope of civilization must mainly rely. In order that this shall be possible, it is necessary that beliefs should be transmitted together with problems and opportunities. Unless the burden is to fall, the young must not only grasp what the old have let go, but they must obtain the same foothold. There are, then, systems of belief which condition effective, concerted, and progressive living. Such systems, it may be further remarked, have their more and their less vital parts. There are some beliefs which, like the keystone of the arch or the base of the pyramid, cannot be dislodged without overthrowing the whole structure. If there be a good in all belief, that good will be greater in such beliefs; and if there be a motive which rallies men to the support of any belief, men will be moved most passionately when such beliefs are at stake. For these are the beliefs most built upon, to which men are most committed, and in which they have invested all their possessions. When they are shaken, it is like the trembling of the solid earth. § 5. Unless, in spite of all prepossessions to the contrary, in spite of a justifiable impatience with every obstacle to Galileo and progress, we can see a certain rightness and the Inquisition sound loyalty in conservatism, we shall remain blind to the meaning of the great transitional eras. Thus we are swift to condemn the Inquisition of the seventeenth century, and the compromises of Galileo and Descartes. The catholic orthodoxy of the time has been proved wrong, cruelly and fatuously wrong; and Galileo and Descartes doubtless lost an opportunity of displaying the heroism of Bruno and Spinoza. But a powerful motive of the drama will have been reduced to a nullity, if it be supposed that the Holy Office was prompted only by malice, or Galileo and Descartes by cowardice. Galileo,' it will be remembered, was convicted of holding that the earth moved. This doctrine was declared to be "absurd, heretical, contrary to the text of Scripture"; and Galileo was compelled to repudiate it. He defended himself on the ground that Scripture was not science. "Hence it appears," he said, "that when we have to do with natural effects brought under our eyes by the experience of our senses, or deduced fron absolute demonstrations, these can in no wise be called in question on the strength of Scripture texts that are susceptible of a thousand different interpretations, for the words of Scripture are not so strictly limited in their significance as the phenomena of nature." But this defence left out of consideration what was referred to in the charge as the "absurdity" and "heretical" character of the new theory. It was not its contradiction of Scripture texts that made it dangerous, but its contradiction of the prevailing belief. This was definitely committed to the immobility of the earth; and in concluding that the Copernican theory, advocated by Galileo, was a menace to it, the Holy Office was not mistaken. But why should the immobility of the earth be a cherished belief, to be protected by the penalty of death? Men are not soberly burned at the stake or submitted to torment by due process of law, out of sheer bloodthirstiness, or on account of trivial offences. It must all appear childish and wanton, unless we can learn to recognize the immense human importance which once attached to what is now 1 1564-1641. Quoted by Mézières, "Trial of Galileo," Popular Science Monthly, vol. X, 1877, p. 389. regarded only as an obsolete astronomy. For it was not merely that men wondered how, if the sun did not move, Joshua could have commanded it to stand still; the Copernican theory contradicted the entire practical orientation that dominated the imagination and justified the plans of Christendom. Never in the history of European civilization has common sense been so comprehensive and so highly unified as it was in Galileo's day. That synopsis of heaven and earth which was the theme of Dante's Divine Comedy, and the fundamental thesis of St. Thomas's Summa Theologiae, was not an esoteric truth, but an illumination shared by common men, and revealing to them the objects of their daily hopes and fears. The earth was the centre of a compact and finite created world. It was prepared by the hand of God for man's habitation, and surrounded by sun, moon, and stars for his convenience and delight. God himself dwelt at the periphery of the system, where he could observe and regulate the human drama enacted at the centre. Man's fall and redemption were the very theme of nature, the key to its interpretation; and the earth as the scene of these transactions was its true centre. Now let it be remembered that this image of nature was vividly present to the common mind, portrayed in every form of art, repeatedly implied in the postures of religious observance, and daily represented in common speech and gesture. And let it be remembered, furthermore, that this was an age in which secular and religious beliefs were not sharply divorced; when what men believed in particular was subordinated to what they believed on the whole, and when, in spite of a growing worldliness, men could never wholly forget the saving of their souls. Is it any wonder, then, that men were shocked when they heard it said that the earth moved, that it was only the loose swinging satellite of a sun that was but one of many suns? When the Christian imagination has never in the centuries that have followed been able entirely to adapt itself to a decentralized and infinite cosmos, with its limitless plurality of |