tly religious nature--whether this figure be the divine
Krishna of Hinduism, the Buddhist's Mother of Mercy, the S[=u]fi's
Beloved, or those objects of traditional Christian piety which are
familiar to all of us--this devotion too passes beyond its immediate
goal and the relative truth there embodied, and is eternalized. It is
characteristic of the primitive mind that it finds a difficulty about
universals, and is most at home with particulars. The success of
Christianity as a world-religion largely abides in the way in which it
meets this need. It is notorious that the person of Jesus, rather than
the Absolute God, is the object of average Protestant devotion. So too
the Catholic peasant may find it easier to approach God through and in
his special saint, or even a special local form of the Madonna. This is
the inevitable corollary of the psychic level at which he lives; and to
speak contemptuously of his "superstition" is wholly beside the point.
Other great faiths have been compelled by experience to meet need of a
particular object on which the primitive religious consciousness can
fasten itself: conspicuous examples being the development within
Buddhism of the cult of the Great Mother, and within pore Brahminism of
Krishna worship. Wherever it may be destined to end, here it is that the
life of the Spirit begins; emerging very gently from our simplest human
impulses and needs. Yet, since the Universal, the Idea, is manifested in
each such particular, we need not refuse to allow that the mass of men
do thus enjoy--in a way that their psychic level makes natural to
them--their own measure of communion with the Creative Spirit of God;
and already live according to their measure a spiritual life.

These objects of religious cultus, then, and the whole symbolic
faith-world which is built up of them, with its angels and demons, its
sharply defined heaven and hell, the Divine personifications which
embody certain attributes of God for us, the purity and gentleness of
the Mother, the simplicity and infinite possibility of the Child, the
divine self-giving of the Cross;--more, the Lamb, the Blood and the Fire
of the revivalists, the oil and water, bread and wine, of a finished
Sacramentalism--all these may be regarded as the vestures placed by man,
at one stage or another of his progress, on the freely-given but
ineffable spiritual fact. Like other clothes, they have now become
closely identified with that which wears them.