Brighton than a general recommendation to turn to the left.
Straight lines that are not parallel must meet at last; but curves
may recoil forever. A pair of lovers might walk along the frontier
of France and Germany, one on the one side and one on the other,
so long as they were not vaguely told to keep away from each other.
And this is a strictly true parable of the effect of our modern
vagueness in losing and separating men as in a mist.

It is not merely true that a creed unites men. Nay, a difference
of creed unites men--so long as it is a clear difference.
A boundary unites. Many a magnanimous Moslem and chivalrous Crusader
must have been nearer to each other, because they were both dogmatists,
than any two homeless agnostics in a pew of Mr. Campbell's chapel.
"I say God is One," and "I say God is One but also Three,"
that is the beginning of a good quarrelsome, manly friendship.
But our age would turn these creeds into tendencies. It would tell
the Trinitarian to follow multiplicity as such (because it was
his "temperament"), and he would turn up later with three hundred
and thirty-three persons in the Trinity. Meanwhile, it would
turn the Moslem into a Monist: a frightful intellectual fall.
It would force that previously healthy person not only to admit
that there was one God, but to admit that there was nobody else.
When each had, for a long enough period, followed the gleam
of his own nose (like the Dong) they would appear again;
the Christian a Polytheist, and the Moslem a Panegoist, both quite mad,
and far more unfit to understand each other than before.

It is exactly the same with politics. Our political vagueness
divides men, it does not fuse them. Men will walk along the edge of a
chasm in clear weather, but they will edge miles away from it in a fog.