The value of a piece of land is the number of footsteps passing by it in twenty-four hours.  The value of a railroad is the number of people near it who cannot keep still.  If there are a great many of these people, the railroad runs its trains for them.  If there are only a few, though they be heroes and prophets, Dantes, Savonarolas, and George Washingtons, trains shall not be run for them.  The railroad is the characteristic property and symbol of property in this modern age, and the entire value of a railroad depends upon its getting control of a crowd—­either a crowd that wants to be where some other crowd is, or a crowd that wants a great many tons of something that some other crowd has.

When we turn from commerce to philosophy, we find the same principle running through them both.  The main thing in the philosophy of to-day is the extraordinary emphasis of environment and heredity.  A man’s destiny is the way the crowd of his ancestors ballot for his life.  His soul—­if he has a soul—­is an atom acted upon by a majority of other atoms.

When we turn to religion in its different phases, we find the same emphasis upon them all—­the emphasis of mass, of majority.  Not that the church exists for the masses—­no one claims this—­but that, such as it is, it is a mass church.  While the promise of Scripture, as a last resort, is often heard in the church about two or three gathered together in God’s name, the Church is run on the working conviction that unless the minister and the elders can gather two or three hundred in God’s name, He will not pay any particular attention to them, or, if He does, He will not pay the bills.  The church of our forefathers, founded on personality, is exchanged for the church of democracy, founded on crowds; and the church of the moment is the institutional church, in which the standing of the clergyman is exchanged for the standing of the congregation.  The inevitable result, the crowd clergyman, is seen on every hand amongst us—­the agent of an audience, who, instead of telling an audience what they ought to do, runs errands for them morning and noon and night.  With coddling for majorities and tact for whims, he carefully picks his way.  He does his people as much good as they will let him, tells them as much truth as they will hear, until he dies at last, and goes to take his place with Puritan parsons who mastered majorities, with martyrs who would not live and be mastered by majorities, and with apostles who managed to make a new world without the help of majorities at all.

Theology reveals the same tendency.  The measuring by numbers is found in all belief, the same cringing before masses of little facts instead of conceiving the few immeasurable ones.  Helpless individuals mastered by crowds are bound to 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.