of
their Pilates before they could cry 'Crucify.' But to-day the
organised, super-national crowd has changed all that. Now the crowd
can make itself heard across half the world. It assembles on the banks
of the Ganges and formulates its demands. The Turk must stay at
Constantinople! If not, well, there will be trouble. There in London
or Paris or Washington the modern Pilate receives his message. The cry
of the crowd hums in his ears across five thousand miles. 'What shall
I do with the bleeding and persecuted?' asks he. 'What is that to us?'
answers the crowd on the Ganges. And expediency gains the day as it
did in Jerusalem.... And fifteen thousand crosses arise with their
bleeding, agonising victims in Anatolia.... The governors of this
world have had but one rule in all the ages. Instead of fixing their
eyes on the stars they have gazed at the streets and have listened to
the crowd.... And the organised crowd can to-day make itself heard
round all the world as it cries, 'Crucify, Crucify.'

III

There is to-day one other added element in the peril of the crowd, and
that is the removal of the forces that formerly restrained and curbed.
The witness of history is that only one spirit can stand up against and
cast out the spirit of the crowd, and that is the spirit of religion.
I am not speaking of Christianity merely, but of religion in its
generic sense. There was only one force in Jerusalem on Good Friday
stronger than the thirst for blood, and that was the feeling that they,
the crowd, must not defile themselves ceremonially. Only one power,
religion alone, can cut the claws of the tiger in man.... In the midst
of the darkest deeds the thought of God's judgment-seat has ever and
again pulled humanity up.

But it is gone now--that sense of the Unseen Assize. Two generations
ago the international crowd of the learned (for crowds are of many
kinds), having discovered they could explain some processes, took it
for granted that nobody initiated these processes. With great
congratulations on the delivery of humanity from superstition, they
bowed the Creator out of His universe. In so doing they thought they
were ushering in a new world, where man would find deliverance from all
ill through the illumined brain.... Alas! for human hopes. The
learned have now gone back to the old truth--that this world is
organised spirit. But the sad thing is that though it is easy to
bamboozle the crowd, yet,