And in the matter of opinion. We speak of public opinion as though it were a free and stable and trustworthy thing. But the public opinion of one generation contradicts the public opinion of another generation. The public opinion of one section of the land denies the public opinion of another section, in the same way in which two sections of society in one community think in opposite ways. Why? Not because all the individuals of these particular generations, or sections, or portions of the community really and independently have thought the thing out for themselves, but because, held under the atmospheric constraint of fear, they are unwilling to break away from what is determined for them by the opinions in the midst of which they live. There is a good deal of pacifist opinion and a great deal more of militarist which is not free and personal at all, but simply herd intimidation. And a great deal of race prejudice and international suspicion is nothing but the miasma arising from cowardice or that bullying selfishness which is essentially cowardly. And a great deal of religion is of the same character. The predominant element in many of the non-Christian religions is fear. It is so in all of the earlier or animistic religions, where men live in constant terror of the spirits that haunt the air or the world, and where a large element of their worship is shaped by that dominant principle of their religion, the dread of the unseen and the unexperienced. Even among us is there not a great deal, both of religious orthodoxy and of religious heresy, that is only the child of fear? There is a coercion of sound doctrine and there is a coercion of false doctrine, and a great many men and women belong to their school of religious opinion simply because they are afraid to break away from the companionship in which they have always been or to disagree with the associations which condition them. Much religious conduct, too, springs only from the fear of one’s environment. One of the saddest things which one meets in going out across the world is the great multitude, especially of young men, who, when they have left Christian lands and the environment and support of Christian surroundings, have simply collapsed in all their religious conviction and character. Asia is strewn from one end of it to the other with the wrecks of men who, while they were at home, supposedly were men of religious character and conviction, but who showed when they went away from home that it was not a matter of their own real selves at all. It was just a matter of their timid servility and acceptance of the conditions imposed upon them from without, so that once they were away from home and free to do as they pleased and had no longer the help and uplift of their surroundings, their environmental religion collapsed and they went in an entirely different way.