4 SOCIAL CULTURE 



set aside, and their result is scarcely visible in the body of faith 

 transmitted to the next generation. 



It is clear this conservatism is necessary. Any new modification 

 of doctrine gets adopted only by the readjustment of individuals 

 within the communion or church. All the inertia of the institution 

 is against it. Again, it is not only necessary but desirable, because 

 it is a purification process, the transmutation of what is individual 

 and tainted with idiosyncrasy, into what is universal and well 

 adapted for all members within the communion. The church must 

 prove all things and hold fast to that which can stand the test. The 

 test is furnished by what is old, by what is already firmly fixed in the 

 body of religious faith. If its foundations could be uprooted so 

 that religion gave up the body of its faith, all authority would go at 

 once to the ground, and with it the relation of the institutional whole 

 to the individuals within it. Such an event can scarcely be conceived 

 in a realizing sense, but a study of the Reign of Terror in the French 

 Revolution aids one to gain a point of view. When a citizen finds 

 himself in a social whole in which all the principles that have governed 

 the community have become shaky, he gets to be unable to count on 

 any particular set of social reactions in his neighbors from day to day, 

 or to calculate what motives they may entertain in their minds in 

 the presence of any practical situation. He is forced into an attitude 

 of universal suspicion of the intentions of his fellow men, and he is 

 in his turn a general object of suspicion himself. The solution forced 

 on the community is the adoption, by the committee of safety, of 

 death for all suspected ones. But the more deaths the more suspicion. 

 For the relatives of the slain, those who yesterday were with us, 

 but who endeavored to dissuade us from guillotining their parents, 

 brothers, or cousins, as to those we are warranted in suspecting 

 that they to-day are planning a new revolution and to-morrow may 

 put us to death. 



We may by this, after a sort, realize the situation when the founda- 

 tions of religious belief are utterly broken up. 



Fortunately for us our civilization carries with it even under 

 varying creeds, sects, and denominations, the great body of religious 

 belief unquestioned. Only the Nihilists offer a radical denial to this 

 body of Christian doctrine, and we can see how easily we might come 

 to a Reign of Terror if it were possible to spread this Nihilistic doc- 

 trine widely among any considerable class of our people. For the 

 Nihilistic view would extend its death-remedy after the destruc- 

 tion of its enemies, to its own ranks, and guillotine its own Robes- 

 pi erres by reason of suspicion and distrust entertained toward one's 

 accomplices. 



The substantiality of the view of religion is the basis of civilization. 

 It holds conservatively to elementary notions of an affirmative 



