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.