preserve.

I go on now to the second aspect of institutional religion: Cultus.

We at once make the transition from Church to Cultus, when we ask
ourselves: how does, how can, the Church as an organized and enduring
society do its special work of creating an atmosphere and imparting a
secret? How is the traditional deposit of spiritual experience handed
on, the individual drawn into the stream of spiritual history and held
there? Remember, the Church exists to foster and hand on, not merely the
moral life, the life of this-world perfection; but the spiritual life in
all its mystery and splendour--the life of more than this-world
perfection, the poetry of goodness, the life that aims at God. And this,
not only in elect souls, which might conceivably make and keep direct
contacts without her help, but in greater or less degree in the mass of
men, who _do_ need help. How is this done? The answer can only be, that
it is mostly done through symbolic acts, and by means of suggestion and
imitation.

All organized churches find themselves committed sooner or later to an
organized cultus. It may be rudimentary. It may reach a high pitch of
aesthetic and symbolic perfection. But even the successive rebels against
dead ceremony are found as a rule to invent some ceremony in their turn.
They learn by experience the truth that men most easily form religious
habits and tend, to have religious experiences when they are assembled
in groups, and caused to perform the same acts. This is so because as we
have already seen, the human psyche is plastic to the suggestions made
to it; and this suggestibility is greatly increased when it is living a
gregarious life as a member of a united congregation or flock, and is
engaged in performing corporate acts. The soldiers' drill is essential
to the solidarity of the army, and the religious service in some form
is--apart from all other considerations--essential to the solidarity of
the Church.

We need not be afraid to acknowledge that from the point of view of the
psychologist one prime reason of the value and need of religious
ceremonies abides in this corporate suggestibility of man: or that one
of their chief works is the production in him of mobility of the
threshold, and hence of spiritual awareness of a generalized kind. As
the modern mother whispers beneficent suggestions into the ear of her
sleeping child[125] so the Church takes her children at their moment of
least resistance, and s