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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: of Methodists, the murdering of Mormons and the massacring of
Armenians, express much rather that aboriginal human neophobia,
that pugnacity of which we all share the vestiges, and that
inborn hatred of the alien and of eccentric and non-conforming
men as aliens, than they express the positive piety of the
various perpetrators. Piety is the mask, the inner force is
tribal instinct. You believe as little as I do, in spite of the
Christian unction with which the German emperor addressed his
troops upon their way to China, that the conduct which he
suggested, and in which other Christian armies went beyond them,
had anything whatever to do with the interior religious life of
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