† The political power of the religious beliefs of a community can be seen at a glance when we consider our own government of India. Our government there, in the ordinary sense of the word, is a government of the few, not a government of the many; and yet the religion or religions of the many impose limitations on our legislators as stringent as any that could be imposed on them by any number of formal mandates. And now let us turn again to a nation’s family life, and consider it in the light which the case of Catholicism throws on the question of what, essentially, democratic action is. The religious life of a Catholic is meritorious only when the beliefs and dispositions of heart which his religion requires of him are spontaneous. No doubt they may have been developed in him by some stimulus from without, but it is essential that, when once present in him, they should draw their life from himself. A saint may rouse a sinner to repentance, but the repentance in its minutest details must be the sinner’s own work. He must be his own overseer, he must be his own taskmaster. In economic production this is not so. A bricklayer may contribute to the building of some exquisite cathedral without any sympathy with the architect’s intentions, and indeed without any knowledge of them; but a man cannot be a true Christian unless Christ’s will becomes his, and unless the beliefs suggested from without are seized on by his own soul, and made a part of himself by his soul’s {231} spontaneous workings. Thus the common religious opinions of the mass of devout Catholics are, theoretically at all events, the sum of a number of independent opinions, which agree because they result from a number of similar but independent experiences. Here we have the essence of democratic action—namely, a natural coincidence of conclusions, which happen to be identical, not because those who hold them have allowed their thinking to be done for them by the same thinkers, but because with regard to the points in question they naturally themselves think and feel identically.