uch ready anatomizing, for the body of beliefs upon which their
ratiocination grounds itself is not fixed but changing, and not artless
and crystal-clear but excessively complex and obscure. It is, indeed,
the chief mark of a man emerged from the general that he has lost most
of his original certainties, and is full of a scepticism which plays
like a spray of acid upon all the ideas that come within his purview,
including especially his own. One does not become surer as one advances
in knowledge, but less sure. No article of faith is proof against the
disintegrating effects of increasing information; one might almost
describe the acquirement of knowledge as a process of disillusion. But
among the humbler ranks of men who make up the great bulk of every
civilized people the increase of information is so slow and so arduous
that this effect is scarcely to be discerned. If, in the course of long
years, they gradually lose their old faiths, it is only to fill the gaps
with new faiths that restate the old ones in new terms. Nothing, in
fact, could be more commonplace than the observation that the crazes
which periodically ravage the proletariat today are, in the main, no
more than distorted echoes of delusions cherished centuries ago. The
fundamental religious ideas of the lower orders of Christendom have not
changed materially in two thousand years, and they were old when they
were first borrowed from the heathen of northern Africa and Asia Minor.
The Iowa Methodist of today, imagining him competent to understand them
at all, would be able to accept the tenets of Augustine without changing
more than a few accents and punctuation marks. Every Sunday his raucous
ecclesiastics batter his ears with diluted and debased filches from _De
Civitate Dei_, and almost every article of his practical ethics may be
found clearly stated in the eminent bishop's Ninety-third Epistle. And
so in politics. The Bolsheviki of the present not only poll-parrot the
balderdash of the French demagogues of 1789; they also mouth what was
gospel to every _bete blonde_ in the Teutonic forest of the fifth
century. Truth shifts and changes like a cataract of diamonds; its
aspect is never precisely the same at two successive instants. But error
flows down the channel of history like some great stream of lava or
infinitely lethargic glacier. It is the one relatively fixed thing in a
world of chaos. It is, perhaps, the one thing that gives human society
the smal