The opposite explanation stares them in the face. We all know in a general way that the New Testament civilized Europe. The book is a mere cryptogram of all possible altruism, and therefore fits the soul of man. Give two men the New Testament--and each man sees himself in it, and it affects each one differently. By developing and unfolding the character and emotions of each according to the law of his individual growth, the book differentiates them at once. The more unhappy a man is the more he needs it. Oppress a man or put him in jail, let him lead a life of self-indulgence, or isolation, and he grows quasi-religious; the altruistic emotion has not been expended in intercourse with his fellows, and it accumulates. This book then, by focussing the altruism in each individual of many generations of men, by being perpetually rediscovered, by existing as a constant force differentiating individuals and so undoing the tyranny of institution after institution founded upon itself, gradually got itself enacted into international law, into custom, into sentiment, and into municipal rule, and has been on the whole the controlling force in Western Europe during the last eighteen centuries. Its symbols express the constant factor in human nature. It is only in so far as a book does this that it is remembered at all. Of course, when a custom arises it is turned on the instant into something that can be used by egoism, and here comes the pivot of the matter. Custom renders men similar to each other. The letter killeth. But the letter does much more than kill. It educates, it trains, it transmits. Hence the two contradictory functions of an institution which we found at work in England, the one to educate, the other to limit. In studying the effect of institutions upon the individual, the whole hierarchy of nature must be reviewed at once. We have nothing to guide us in our study of the animals except our knowledge of man, but we have much to find in that study which will enlarge and illustrate that knowledge. Every naturalist and every sociologist should receive his preliminary training in the political arena, and every politician in the greenhouse and the menagerie. Let us look at the social life of the ants. The ant seems to show a stage of progress in which the individuals have grown alike through a slavish observance of certain institutions. It is certain that the ant is a ritualistic being, formal, narrow, intolerant, incapable of new ideas or private enterprise. He hates any one differing from himself, whether more or less virtuous. He would regard any suggested improvement in the arrangement of his house as a sacrilege. He works constantly for the public with a devotion that nothing but religious zeal can explain, and is in his own limited way completely happy. But the tyranny of public opinion, the subserviency to a State church goes far to make him contemptible.