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rough generalization that creeds tend to live for two or
three centuries, or to express it in biological measure, for
not more than about ten generations.
Consider some of the creeds that have flourished ex-
cessively inside the Christian religion. In the fourth and
fifth centuries there were fanatical creeds associated with
metaphysical questions of the nature of the deity, and
men were ready to die, and to kill, for the sake of subtle
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questions, incomprehensible to us now, connected with
the nature of the Trinity. As time went on this creed
reached its old age and tended to become a political per-
secution, not of individuals, but of whole nations such as
those that had adopted the Arian heresy. Then again in
the eleventh century there were the Crusades, a more
fitting creed for the semi-barbarous peoples of western
Europe. They lasted about two centuries, and also de-
generated in the end into a political instrument for rival
Christian parties, who by that time had little left of the
original enthusiasm against Islam. Then there is the Re-
formation, which started towards the beginning of the
sixteenth century. Some may hold that we arc still too
near the Reformation to pronounce an opinion on its
present vitality, but it is certain that its colour had very
materially changed within little more than a century, for
the Thirty Years War was a war for power, not for reli-
gion, even though it was largely between Protestants
and Catholics. It would be most interesting to study
whether there were similar growths and decays of creeds
in Islam or Buddhism, and also to study the behaviour
of such creeds as philosophical Stoicism, which never
provoked the same fierce fanaticism as did the religious
creeds.
Another feature of creeds seems to be rather general.
Though the majority of a population, say something
like nine-tenths, accept their creed implicitly and re-
gard it as part of the law of nature, there is always a small
minority who do not. Most people call them the sheep
follow the ideas of their leaders unquestioningly, but
this minority the goats goes by contraries, and dis-
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believes anything just because those around them believe
it. The goats are often not very pleasant people, but they
are usually above the average of intelligence. It is prob-
ably the corroding influence of the goats that gradually
saps the vitality of a creed by its cumulative infection,
and indeed there may well be a proportionality between
the number of goats in a community and the life span
of the creed of the sheep in that community.
In future history the constancy of human nature
makes it certain that man will continue to be dominated
by enthusiasm for creeds of one kind or another; he will
persecute and be persecuted again and again for the sake
of ideas, some of which to later ages will seem of no
importance, and even unintelligible. But there is one
much more valuable aspect of creeds that must be
noticed. They serve to give a continuity to policy far
greater than can usually be attained by intellectual con-
viction. There are many cases in history of enlightened
statesmen who have devoted their lives to carrying
through some measure for the general good. They may
have succeeded, only to find that the next generation
neglects all they have done, so that it becomes undone
again in favour of some other quite different way of
benefiting humanity. The intellectual adoption of a
policy thus often hardly survives for more than a single
generation, and this is too short a period for such a policy
to overcome the tremendous effects of pure chance. But
if the policy can arouse enough enthusiasm to be incor-
porated in a creed, then there is at least a prospect that it
will continue for something like ten generations, and
that is long enough to give a fair probability that it will
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THE NEXT MILLION YEARS
prevail over the operations of pure chance. Thus a creed
may have the rudiment of the quality, possessed by the
genes of mankind, of being able to produce a permanent
effect on humanity.
If the history of the future is not regarded as the auto-
matic unfolding of a sequence of uncontrollable events
and few of us would accept this inevitability then
anyone who has decided what measures are desirable for
the permanent betterment of his fellows will naturally
have to consider what is the best method of carrying his
policy through. There are three levels at which he might
work. The first and weakest is by direct conscious poli-
tical action; his policy is likely to die with him and so to
be ineffective. The second is by the creation of a creed,
since this has the prospect of lasting for quite a number
of generations, so that there is some prospect of really
changing the world a little with it. The third would be
by directly changing man's nature, working through
the laws of biological heredity, and if this could be done
for long enough it would be really effective. But even
if we knew all about man's genes, which we certainly
do not, a policy of this kind would be almost impossible
to enforce even for a short time, and, since it would take
many generations to carry it through, it would almost
certainly be dropped long before any perceptible effects
were achieved. That is why creeds are so tremendously
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