The second weakness of partisanship is that it breaks the community into vertical divisions, and promotes fictitious antagonisms and kinships which run against the horizontal affiliations and loyalties of a man’s life. This tendency was nicely illustrated in a play by Mr. St. John Ervine, called Mixed Marriage, which dealt with the love affair of a young girl and a young man who were separated by the religions that had been handed down by their parents. In Mr. Ervine’s wretched little Ulster community, these religions served as an excuse to keep people from being friendly and decent to their neighbors. Now it is obvious that mating, and making friends with those who have common interests and sentiments, and mixing freely within the whole community, are highly important horizontal interests; they tend to unite people in a common bond which is fundamental for the reason that these interests and activities are essentially human. The antagonism between two Christian sects, on the other hand, undermines the good life as a whole, because it insists that there is no other good than a religious good--a good embodied in a pope, or in the practice of scoffing at a pope--while it is obvious to anyone who has possession of his senses that kissing a pretty girl is good, and having a friendly pipe with one’s neighbor is good, and that institutions which prevent one from doing these things at appropriate times are perverted and antisocial. It is true that people who emphasize religious interests take “high ground,” as the saying is, and that those who value the friendly pipe seem by implication to take low ground: but what the partisans fail to see is that there is a good human case for low ground, and that, for the great majority of people it may prove to be not merely the only practicable ground, but in its own right a good and sufficient one.