is a challenge to their faith. For crowd ideas may function successfully where a special social environment is created which is congenial to them—that is, where the whole number who are present and who count believe them. If one to whom the group is obliged to listen withholds assent, his very presence is a fact which is in conflict with the escape from the real which the crowd mind demands. The religious group in days gone by removed him from its midst. His "wickedness" was a fact which justified it in treating him with the severest cruelty. More recently the group seeks to explain away his nonconformity if he in other respects succeeds in winning its admiration. The attitude of certain religious writers toward the religious beliefs of Abraham Lincoln is a case in point.

If the heresy cannot be explained away, the non-conformist, however great he may be, is condemned and scorned, and his name remains to be an object of indignant attack long after he is dead. It is not an unheard-of thing for a religious group to sit and listen with every evidence of approval while a popular preacher dwells upon the "wickedness" of Thomas Paine, the alleged miserable life of Darwin, the "terrible death" of Ingersoll or the deliberate in

fidelity and stupid ignorance of a Spencer or Huxley or Haeckel,-assuring his hearers that such enemies of God are now suffering the eternal torment which they justly deserve. It is of course a pitiable spectacle, and religion as we have sought to understand it should not be directly held accountable for it. This is a crowd phenomenon, and while the religious community is not necessarily or by any means. uniformly crowd-minded, yet the sectarian and partisan spirit may easily attach itself to religion. The multitude is ever prone to rush in to the religious group and deck itself out in religious formulas in the vain attempt to save itself from itself. The many would fain enter the special community and be at once exclusive and common. The masses having always a hunger for mystery and deliverance from the common lot, are attracted by that which speaks of a kingdom which is not of this world. They eagerly clutch at or revere, though at a distance, that which they think gives "goodness" by magic. Entering the religious community, they degrade its values, caricature its sanctities and bring to it the partisan rivalry which they manifest in other spheres. The religious group ceases to be an escape from the world and

becomes one of the contending parties in the social struggle. The culture community is transformed into the cult.

Thus a crowd is formed whose impelling motives may be wholly irrevelant to those which led to the establishment of the religious community. And the crowd mind is the same— "human all too human," whether its behavior is that of throwing bricks in the street or pantomiming the solemn gestures of the religious. In the latter case the crowd would make itself holy and irresistible, render itself immune to criticism, disarm opposition, and secure its interests, while appearing to itself to be speaking the language of eternity. But though the crowd may thus make use of the externals of religion, the true religious community is not the crowd. Sometimes it withdraws further within-a community within a community, an esoteric group of the initiated. Sometimes it seeks to transform the crowd with the light of its own inspirations and sometimes it is lost to view in the struggle. But always it is there, recognized or unrecognized, making the expressions of its own experience the norms which the others copy, and out of its struggle for orientation to reality, creating the values which

the others strive to attain. Out of its symbolic appreciation of the human significance of reality it elaborates the dream which brings consolation to men in the pain and drudgery of their existence, and an imaginary escape from facts which men find dreary and make sordid.

I

VII

Forms of Religious Behavior

T is said that religion is a life. The early Christians spoke of their move

ment as "the way." Buddhism is "the path." Among Catholics "religious" orders are distinguished from the secular in that the former live according to more rigidly prescribed forms of behavior. Thus we may say that religion manifests itself in certain actions. "By their fruits ye shall know them." Obviously, then, there are certain modes of conduct which are generally recognized as religious, and others which seem to have no religious significance. From the behaviorist standpoint, all mental life is reaction of some sort to stimulus. Is it possible to discover a psychological principle which will enable us to distinguish a religious act from one which is not religious?

Such a distinction is difficult because deeds which are considered religious in one age or community may be indifferent or even anti