te any great social reform. The
smallest and forlornest actual slum baby appeals to our sympathy
immeasurably more than a vast, dim aggregate of indistinguishable items
called the Race; for we have actually met the slum-baby, and we have
never met--what is more, we shall never meet--the Race. This tendency
to treat the individual as negligible is as futile as it is inhuman; in
the long run it will be found that he who loveth not his brother whom
he hath seen, cannot love {68} the Race which he hath not seen. No
matter by how many times we multiply nothing, the result is
still--nothing. If the individuals do not count, neither can the
species which is made up of such individuals. Or, if "the Race is the
drama, and we are the incidents," it must be observed that no great and
noble drama can be strung together out of trivial and unmeaning
incidents. All the talk about Mankind as the greater being, "the great
and growing Being of the Species," "the eternally conscious Being of
all things," is only the old, thin, unsatisfying idolatry of
Positivism. If we wish to be social reformers in earnest we must take
care of the individuals, and the race will take care of itself.

That the monistic denial of all individual significance should lead to
the denial of a future life is only what we should expect; for if man,
as such, does not _matter_, why should he _survive_? On the other
hand, the more we care for the individual, refusing to regard him
merely as "an experiment of the species for the species," the more
irresistibly shall we be impelled to believe that this life is not all.
It is the inestimable achievement of Christianity, by its insistence on
the infinite value of the soul, to have given the strongest impetus and
support to belief in personal immortality. That, however, is an aspect
of our subject which demands, and will subsequently come up for,
separate treatment.

{69}

What, for the present, we must yet once more point out, as we did in
the preceding chapter, is this--that wide as is the influence of a
non-Christian writer like Mr. Wells, the danger of such teaching is
intensified when it is given by those who profess Christianity.
Doubtless, Bousset is right when he points to the closer contact
between East and West as one of the causes of the growth in our midst
of a type of religion in which "the human ego is put on one side and
almost reduced to zero." Doubtless, also, he is correct in saying "the
ad