Secondly, they serve us greatly, when they simply cause a preexisting community of thought to be mutually recognized.  It is much to bring like to like, brand to brand, believing soul to believing soul.  As several pieces of anthracite coal will together make a powerful heat, but separately will not burn at all, so in the conjunction of similar faiths and beliefs there is a wholly new effect; it is not at all the mere sum of the forces previously in operation, but a pure product of union.  “My confidence in my own belief,” said Novalis, “is increased infinitely the moment another shares it with me.  The reason is obvious.  You and I have grown up apart, and have never conferred together; our temperaments, culture, circumstances are different; we have come to have certain thoughts which seem to us true and deep, but each of us doubts whether these thoughts may not be due to his peculiarities of mind, position, and influence.  But to-day we come together, and discover, that, despite these outward diversities in which we are so widely unlike, our fundamental faiths are one and the same; the same thoughts, the same beliefs have sprung into life in our separate souls.  Instantly is suggested a unity underlying our divided being, a law of thought abiding in mind itself,—­not merely in your mind or mine, but in the mind and soul of man.  What we arrive at, therefore, is not merely the sum of you and me, the aggregate of two men’s opinions, but the universal, the absolute, and spiritually necessary.  Such is always the suggestion which spontaneous unity of faith carries with it; hence it awakens religion, and gives total peace and rest.”

But the faiths which are to be capable of these divine embraces must indeed be spontaneous and native.  Hence those who create factitious unity of creed render these fructifications impossible.  If we agree, not because the absolute soul has uttered in both of us the same word, but because we have both been fed with dust out of the same catechism, our unity will disgust and weary us rather than invigorate.  Dr. Johnson said he would compel men to believe as he and the Church of England did, “because,” he reasoned, “if another differs from me, he weakens my confidence in my own scheme of faith, and so injures me.”  Now this speech is good just so far as it asserts social dependence in belief; it is bad, it is idiotic or insane, so far as it advocates the substitution of a factitious and artificial unity for one of spiritual depth and reality.  The fruits of the tree of life are not to be successfully thieved.  In dishonest hands they become ashes and bitterness.  He who has more faith in an Act of Parliament than in God and the universe may be a good conventional believer; but, in truth, the choice he makes is the essence of all denial and even of all atheism and blasphemy.