When we survey the existing races of mankind
from Greenland to Tierra del Fuego, or from Scotland to Singapore,
we observe that they are distinguished one from the other by a great
variety of religions, and that these distinctions are not, so to
speak, merely coterminous with the broad distinctions of race, but
descend into the minuter subdivisions of states and commonwealths,
nay, that they honeycomb the town, the village, and even the family,
so that the surface of society all over the world is cracked and
seamed, sapped and mined with rents and fissures and yawning
crevasses opened up by the disintegrating influence of religious
dissension. Yet when we have penetrated through these differences,
which affect mainly the intelligent and thoughtful part of the
community, we shall find underlying them all a solid stratum of
intellectual agreement among the dull, the weak, the ignorant, and
the superstitious, who constitute, unfortunately, the vast majority
of mankind. One of the great achievements of the nineteenth century
was to run shafts down into this low mental stratum in many parts of
the world, and thus to discover its substantial identity everywhere.
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