" I DO not understand what you mean by a belief." We were sitting upon a high bank, near a waterfall, and the yellow river-flood foamed beneath "like beer" my friend had said. A great building crowned the height above the fall, like a Norman castle with battlements. "What is that cliff-castle there but a belief?" I said. We talked about it together. We rose up and went through the great iron gateway with its spiked portcullis lifted. A multitude of men were busy within. Loaded wagons came jolting to the open doors, and grain sacks were carried within—enough to feed an army. Huge bales of hops were hoisted into other doors—the leaven for the bread of a great multitude. Men with unwieldy bodies and bloated faces rolled barrels upon trucks, then drove off slowly their sleek ponderous horses. A locomotive shrieked, then rumbled its train of cars towards a warehouse, and men began to load upon them cases packed with straw. Upon all this bustle the high battlemented walls looked down as if they were age-lasting.
Within, there was the ceaseless hum of machinery turning, and men going about. They were engaged in a service— the service of a belief. No gem-bedight idol had more care and polishing than the shining copper spheres connected with this worship. And the keeper of the brass-hooped vats was as proud of their capacity as an ancient Greek might have been of the deeds of Hercules. Prouder yet was the guardian and director of the visible motive force which kept going the innumerable wheels and flapping belts. Immense seemed to be the scope of the power he controlled, and he spoke as if he were the guardian of a god. Yet he might have been doing better for the world in spinning a prayer-wheel than in keeping that great engine moving in the service of this belief.
And for what was all this labor, pride and devotion? The owner who felt himself to be the center and source of all the seeming industry, believed the castle and its garrison to be the result of brains—his brains. He could prate of enterprise, and what he beheld about him was to him the sign of prosperity. His beautiful wife at home in her white and gold parlor was also a sign that he was well-to-do. Yet he was but the king in a kingdom of belief, and the others but the priests and servants of those subject to that belief. And those who were subjects and paid tribute to king and priest about them, it is a long, sad story. They pay their money for that which is not bread, though made from the good grain of the earth. They believe a lie and hence are forever unsatisfied. All over the city they have their synagogues and groves; thither they come seeking blessing and get it not, but rather woe and a curse.
