Forms of government and constitutions, too--living thoughts at the beginning--become mechanized thoughts after a time, and then they are a precarious asset. Precarious because, though they are properly only instruments to assist us in our adjustments to the conditions of life, they become the objects to which adjustment is made. The notion of sovereignty, for example--that ark of the covenant within the holy of holies of political principles--has become a mechanized thought and an obstacle to the establishment of any rule of reason in the world as a whole. The professions and the other occupations, likewise, always run into the danger of introversion as soon as they begin to think about themselves. Each wants to fix its functions so that they will “stay put.” Traditions of many sorts now become, essentially, dogmas; divisions and subdivisions of function are established, and each functionary becomes a breathing precedent. Machinery unending is interjected between the needs of client or customer or employer and the satisfaction of these needs. Some business men, it is said, have undertaken to create a tribunal of their own that shall settle their legal difficulties without resort to the law. What a comment is this upon the legal profession! There is a considerable area of human need that calls for both spiritual and medical help, yet physicians and ministers can hardly get together upon the most obvious cases because professional precedents have not paved the road thereto. Just so, the dentist goes his way, and the physician his, to the detriment of the patient, all because one is dentist and the other physician. The orthodoxies of religion, whether conservative or liberal, are natural enough, for they reflect a sense of the greater issues of life and a sense of the importance of any truth about them that we may be able to reach. Yet the endeavor of piety to think itself and to put itself into the form of propositions has become a bane to piety. For accepting pious declarations both deludes us into classifying ourselves as pious, and excuses us from looking straight into the eye of actuality, whether contemporary or ancient. Limiting the freedom of the mind is perhaps not the worst thing about orthodoxy, though it is bad enough. Rather, ecclesiastical custodianship of particular religions or particular types within a religion, tends to displace thought-activity from the greater issues of life to the minor ones. The great issues having been settled, as is supposed, ministers, church boards, and denominational leaders betake themselves to making the church, which already has the truth, get the men, get the means, build machinery, and make it go.