believe in a kind of infinitely helpless God. He
stands in the midst of the crowds of His laws and the systems of His
worlds: to those who are not religious, a pale First Cause; and to those
who are, a Great Sentimentality far away in the heavens, who, in a kind
of vast weak-mindedness (a Puritan would say), seems to want everybody
to be good and hopes they will, but does not quite know what to do
about it if they are not.

Every age has its typical idea of heaven and its typical idea of hell
(in some of them it would be hard to tell which is which), and every
civilization, has its typical idea of God. A civilization with sovereign
men in it has a sovereign God; and a crowd civilization, reflecting its
mood on the heavens, is inclined to a pleasant, large-minded God,
eternally considering everybody and considering everything, but
inefficient withal, a kind of legislature of Deity, typical of
representative institutions at their best and at their worst.

If we pass from our theology to our social science we come to the most
characteristic result of the crowd principle that the times afford. We
are brought face to face with Socialism, the millennium machine, the
Corliss engine of progress. It were idle to deny to the Socialist that
he is right--and more right, indeed, than most of us, in seeing that
there is a great wrong somewhere; but it would be impossible beyond this
point to make any claim for him, except that he is honestly trying to
create in the world a wrong we do not have as yet, that shall be large
enough to swallow the wrong we have. The term "Socialism" stands for
many things, in its present state; but so far as the average Socialist
is concerned, he may be defined as an idealist who turns to materialism,
that is, to mass, to carry his idealism out. The world having discovered
two great ideals in the New Testament, the service of all men by all
other men, and the infinite value of the individual, the Socialist
expects to carry out one of these ideals by destroying the other.

The principle that an infinitely helpful society can be produced by
setting up a row of infinitely helpless individuals is Socialism, as the
average Socialist practises it. The average Socialist is the type of the
eager but effeminate reformer of all ages, because he seeks to gain by
machinery things nine tenths of the value of which to men is in gaining
them for themselves. Socialism is the attempt to invent conveniences
for heroes,