involved
in it. There is the continued belief in a Deity who can and should be
persuaded to change the weather, or who punishes those who offend Him by
famine, earthquake and pestilence. Vestigial relics of all these phases
can still be discovered in the Book of Common Prayer. There is further
the undying vogue of the religious amulet. There is the purely magical
efficacy which some churches attribute to their sacraments, rites,
shrines, liturgic formulae and religious objects; others, to the texts of
their scriptures.[128] These things, and others like them, are not only
significant survivals from the past. They also represent the religious
side of something that continues active in us at present. Since, then,
it should clearly be the object of all spiritual endeavor to win the
whole man and not only his reason for God, speaking to his instincts in
language that they understand, we should not too hurriedly despise or
denounce these things. Far better that our primitive emotions, with
their vast store of potential energy, should be won for spiritual
interests on the only terms which they can grasp, than that they should
be left to spend themselves on lower objects.

If therefore the spiritual or the regenerate life is not likely to
prosper without some incorporation in institutions, some definite link
with the past, it seems also likely to need for its full working-out and
propaganda the symbols and liturgy of a cultus. Here again, the right
path will be that of fulfilment, not of destruction; a deeper
investigation of the full meaning of cultus, the values it conserves and
the needs it must meet, a clearer and humbler understanding of our human
limitations. We must also clearly realize as makers of the future, that
as the Church has its special dangers of conservatism, cosiness,
intolerance, a checking of initiative, the domestic tendency to enclose
itself and shirk reality; so the cultus has also its special dangers, of
which the chief are perhaps formalism, magic, and spiritual sloth.
Receiving and conserving as it does all the successive deposits of
racial experience, it is the very home of magic: of the archaic tendency
to attribute words and deeds, special power to a priestly caste, and to
make of itself the essential mediator between Creative Spirit and the
soul. Further, using perpetually as it does and must symbols of the most
archaic sort, directly appealing to the latent primitive in each of us,
it offers us