ve a truth; and still more oddly perhaps, it does involve a
compliment. The American Constitution does resemble the Spanish
Inquisition in this: that it is founded on a creed. America is the only
nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth
with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of
Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also
theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all
men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give
them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. It
certainly does condemn anarchism, and it does also by inference condemn
atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority
from whom these equal rights are derived. Nobody expects a modern
political system to proceed logically in the application of such dogmas,
and in the matter of God and Government it is naturally God whose claim
is taken more lightly. The point is that there is a creed, if not about
divine, at least about human things.

Now a creed is at once the broadest and the narrowest thing in the
world. In its nature it is as broad as its scheme for a brotherhood of
all men. In its nature it is limited by its definition of the nature of
all men. This was true of the Christian Church, which was truly said to
exclude neither Jew nor Greek, but which did definitely substitute
something else for Jewish religion or Greek philosophy. It was truly
said to be a net drawing in of all kinds; but a net of a certain
pattern, the pattern of Peter the Fisherman. And this is true even of
the most disastrous distortions or degradations of that creed; and true
among others of the Spanish Inquisition. It may have been narrow
touching theology, it could not confess to being narrow about
nationality or ethnology. The Spanish Inquisition might be admittedly
Inquisitorial; but the Spanish Inquisition could not be merely Spanish.
Such a Spaniard, even when he was narrower than his own creed, had to be
broader than his own empire. He might burn a philosopher because he was
heterodox; but he must accept a barbarian because he was orthodox. And
we see, even in modern times, that the same Church which is blamed for
making sages heretics is also blamed for making savages priests. Now in
a much vaguer and more evolutionary fashion, there is something of the
same idea at the back of the great American experiment;