It lets us love truth more whole-heartedly, and become acquainted with liberty. And so our godless age has been characterized by a wistful hunger and search after religions. And some of these isms have been able to bind together a number of native impulses, and hold men almost as strongly as God did. With its system of revealed economics, it offers, too, an Absolute in which mental curiosity ran rest. It has its gospel according to Marx.
Socialism is no mean religion.
But it is not a religion that binds or blesses the rich and powerful, and so it could hardly become established in a country like ours. We needed something that would give us the same emotional crystallization without greatly disturbing the profits on capital. Quite consciously a great many good people were searching for a thing of this kind, for a new and vigorous religion. And now, through the lucky accidents of history, they have found it. For there is nothing more copiously able to bind into its bosom the multiple threads of human impulse, and establish that fixed and absolute glorious tyranny among our purposes, than military patriotism.