y in its later stages acts to eliminate.

Chapter Thirteen ~~ Survivals of the Non-Invidious Interests

In an increasing proportion as time goes on, the anthropomorphic
cult, with its code of devout observations, suffers a progressive
disintegration through the stress of economic exigencies and the decay
of the system of status. As this disintegration proceeds, there come to
be associated and blended with the devout attitude certain other motives
and impulses that are not always of an anthropomorphic origin, nor
traceable to the habit of personal subservience. Not all of these
subsidiary impulses that blend with the habit of devoutness in the later
devotional life are altogether congruous with the devout attitude or
with the anthropomorphic apprehension of the sequence of phenomena. The
origin being not the same, their action upon the scheme of devout
life is also not in the same direction. In many ways they traverse the
underlying norm of subservience or vicarious life to which the code of
devout observations and the ecclesiastical and sacerdotal institutions
are to be traced as their substantial basis. Through the presence of
these alien motives the social and industrial regime of status gradually
disintegrates, and the canon of personal subservience loses the support
derived from an unbroken tradition. Extraneous habits and proclivities
encroach upon the field of action occupied by this canon, and it
presently comes about that the ecclesiastical and sacerdotal structures
are partially converted to other uses, in some measure alien to the
purposes of the scheme of devout life as it stood in the days of the
most vigorous and characteristic development of the priesthood.

Among these alien motives which affect the devout scheme in its
later growth, may be mentioned the motives of charity and of social
good-fellowship, or conviviality; or, in more general terms, the various
expressions of the sense of human solidarity and sympathy. It may
be added that these extraneous uses of the ecclesiastical structure
contribute materially to its survival in name and form even among
people who may be ready to give up the substance of it. A still more
characteristic and more pervasive alien element in the motives
which have gone to formally uphold the scheme of devout life is that
non-reverent sense of aesthetic congruity with the environment, which is
left as a residue of the latter-day act of worship after elimination
of its