Their powers appeared in every crisis of the Great War, when a small group of pacifists and internationalists, a microscopic minority in every country, were yet constantly figuring as diplomatists and intermediaries and men on whose attitude great issues might depend.
A man like Mr.Macdonald, not a workman nor a formal or real representative of workmen, was followed everywhere by the limelight; while the millions of workmen who worked and fought were out of focus and therefore looked like a fog.

Just as such figures give a fictitious impression of unity between the crowds fighting for different flags and frontiers, so there are similar figures giving a fictitious unity to the crowds following different creeds.
There are already Moslems who are Modernists; there have always been a ruling class of Jews who are Materialists.

Perhaps it would be true to say about much of the philosophical controversy in Europe, that many Jews tend to be Materialists, but all tend to be Monists, though the best in the sense of being Monotheists.
The worst are in a much grosser sense materialists, and have motives very different from the dry idealism of men like Mr.Macdonald, which is probably sincere enough in its way.

But with whatever motives, these intermediaries everywhere bridge the chasm between creeds as they do the chasm between countries.

Everywhere they exalt the minority that is indifferent over the majority that is interested.
Just as they would make an international congress out of the traitors of all nations, so they would make an ecumenical council out of the heretics of all religions.
Mild constitutionalists in our own country often discuss the possibility of a method of protecting the minority.
If they will find any possible method of protecting the majority, they will have found something practically unknown to the modern world.
The majority is always at a disadvantage; the majority is difficult to idealise, because it is difficult to imagine.
The minority is generally idealised, sometimes by its servants, always by itself.