II
It is, however, only when the crowd is organised that the crowd becomes a real menace. The horrors of war are unspeakable just because they are the horrors committed by the crowd perfectly organised. A crowd that has met for no purpose, and is a mere fortuitous concourse of atoms, can do neither good nor harm. In proportion to its organisation is the peril of the crowd. The power of the crowd that committed the greatest crime in the history of the world lay in the fact that it was perfectly organised. It was there in that chilly morning with only one purpose, to cry, 'Crucify, Crucify.' Across all the mists of the centuries we can see the organisers at work moving among the crowd. They whisper to one group: 'He struck you in your property, overturning the tables of your barter; if he lives you are ruined'; and to the other: 'Remember his blasphemies: what he called himself.' ... And in the trail of the organisers arose with intenser volume the cry, 'Crucify, Crucify.' It was the organised crowd that nailed the Son of Man to the cross.
The fact that confronts us to-day is that the crowd is at last perfectly organised; so perfectly organised that all the industry and transport of three kingdoms can be stopped by the flash of an electric wire. The crowd knows what it wants, and it has organised itself to get it. But the crowd to-day is not an isolated handful such as that of old in Athens or Jerusalem. The crowd is now world-wide and international. What is shouted on the banks of the Volga in the morning, at noon is shouted on the Clyde, and at the setting of the sun in New York. For the cable and the telephone and the wireless have woven humanity into one web. From the rising to the setting of the sun, slowly but steadily on the forge the international crowd is being hammered into the unity of steel.
In the old days the crowd had to storm their way into the presence of their Pilates before they could cry 'Crucify.' But to-day the organised, super-national crowd has changed all that. Now the crowd can make itself heard across half the world. It assembles on the banks of the Ganges and formulates its demands. The Turk must stay at Constantinople! If not, well, there will be trouble. There in London or Paris or Washington the modern Pilate receives his message. The cry of the crowd hums in his ears across five thousand miles. 'What shall I do with the bleeding and persecuted?' asks he. 'What is that to us?' answers the crowd on the Ganges. And expediency gains the day as it did in Jerusalem.... And fifteen thousand crosses arise with their bleeding, agonising victims in Anatolia.... The governors of this world have had but one rule in all the ages. Instead of fixing their eyes on the stars they have gazed at the streets and have listened to the crowd.... And the organised crowd can to-day make itself heard round all the world as it cries, 'Crucify, Crucify.'
III
There is to-day one other added element in the peril of the crowd, and that is the removal of the forces that formerly restrained and curbed. The witness of history is that only one spirit can stand up against and cast out the spirit of the crowd, and that is the spirit of religion. I am not speaking of Christianity merely, but of religion in its generic sense. There was only one force in Jerusalem on Good Friday stronger than the thirst for blood, and that was the feeling that they, the crowd, must not defile themselves ceremonially. Only one power, religion alone, can cut the claws of the tiger in man.... In the midst of the darkest deeds the thought of God's judgment-seat has ever and again pulled humanity up.
But it is gone now—that sense of the Unseen Assize. Two generations ago the international crowd of the learned (for crowds are of many kinds), having discovered they could explain some processes, took it for granted that nobody initiated these processes. With great congratulations on the delivery of humanity from superstition, they bowed the Creator out of His universe. In so doing they thought they were ushering in a new world, where man would find deliverance from all ill through the illumined brain.... Alas! for human hopes. The learned have now gone back to the old truth—that this world is organised spirit. But the sad thing is that though it is easy to bamboozle the crowd, yet, once they are bamboozled, it passes the wit of man to debamboozle them again. The scientific crowd bowed God out a generation ago; but to bow Him in again is beyond them. And the spirit of the crowd is left to-day without curb or chain from Siberia to Cork.
IV
There are few sadder thoughts than this—to think how the Church has thrown away the power that once it knew how to use, the mesmeric instinct of the crowd. 'In our State,' said an American, 'the devil is fighting hard against the Church!' 'Ah! in Montana it is different,' was the reply; 'there with us, the devil is running the Church.' It would look as if it were even so. Wherever there was a crowd waiting anywhere on the ministry of the Gospel, the devil set himself to break up that crowd. He did it in ways most skilful. Had his true personality appeared, he would instantly have been cast forth. It was therefore apparelled as an angel of light that he set about the work. He never failed to mouth high-sounding phrases. His favourite watchword was principle. It did not matter much what the principle was if only thereby the crowd could be broken up. In the beginning of the seventeenth century the evangel of Jesus, that was committed to the winds of Galilee and to a handful of peasants, was intellectualised into a massive system of propositions that was to be for all time the test of orthodoxy. One might smile if the fountain of tears lay not here. That religion, which is like the wind blowing where it listeth, was caught at last, and embodied in legal enactments and formulas—sheltered behind statistics! Whoever heard of wind blowing through legal documents? Build shelters and there is no more wind! Yet these legal documents became the test of that religion which is life and which is love. If any doubt was expressed about the use of shelters when men needed the fresh breeze from heaven—then the devil appeared and said that to abide by the shelter was a principle. Nobody must touch or change that structure. If that be done, then those who were loyal must separate. By a discreet use of the principle of loyalty to confessions the devil broke up crowd after crowd of worshipping Christians. There was nothing that he could not use for that purpose. The doubt arose whether the all-loving Father could really send babes to everlasting torments or decree that the vast majority of mankind be tortured, for ever and ever. That was used to break up the Church. A hymn, a paraphrase, the form of a prayer, the posture at worship, a vestment—anything, everything, was good enough for the devil's purpose. By these he achieved his ends. The crowd was no longer to be found in one sanctuary. Here, where I write, in the days of my boyhood the folk assembled in the open air for their great Christian festival on the second Sunday of August. It was a moving spectacle to see a couple of thousand people in the hearing of the sea, with the hills brooding over them, raise a psalm to heaven. But that crowd has been broken up into four fragments. There is no longer a crowd. The devil has secured its overthrow. On the wave of an emotion generated by a thousand hearts no soul shall again be wafted heavenward in that green place. For the devil has seen to it that the thousand hearts shall be no longer there.