of
religious history, who can be appealed to by the creed and judged by it;
the saint, the hypocrite, the brawler, the weak brother. These people
do each other good; or they all join together to do the hypocrite good,
with heavy and repeated blows. But once break the bond of doctrine which
alone holds these people together and each will gravitate to his own
kind outside the group. The hypocrites will all get together and
call each other saints; the saints will get lost in a desert and call
themselves weak brethren; the weak brethren will get weaker and weaker
in a general atmosphere of imbecility; and the brawler will go off
looking for somebody else with whom to brawl.

This has very largely happened to modern English religion; I have been
in many churches, chapels, and halls where a confident pride in having
got beyond creeds was coupled with quite a paralysed incapacity to
get beyond catchwords. But wherever the falsity appears it comes from
neglect of the same truth: that men should agree on a principle, that
they may differ on everything else; that God gave men a law that they
might turn it into liberties.

There was hugely more sense in the old people who said that a wife
and husband ought to have the same religion than there is in all the
contemporary gushing about sister souls and kindred spirits and auras of
identical colour. As a matter of fact, the more the sexes are in violent
contrast the less likely they are to be in violent collision. The more
incompatible their tempers are the better. Obviously a wife's soul
cannot possibly be a sister soul. It is very seldom so much as a first
cousin. There are very few marriages of identical taste and temperament;
they are generally unhappy. But to have the same fundamental theory, to
think the same thing a virtue, whether you practise or neglect it, to
think the same thing a sin, whether you punish or pardon or laugh at
it, in the last extremity to call the same thing duty and the same thing
disgrace—this really is necessary to a tolerably happy marriage;
and it is much better represented by a common religion than it is by
affinities and auras. And what applies to the family applies to the
nation. A nation with a root religion will be tolerant. A nation with no
religion will be bigoted. Lastly, the worst effect of all is this:
that when men come together to profess a creed, they come courageously,
though it is to hide in catacombs and caves. But when they come