it requires a return, in deed or
faith; a payment by which the fact of his salvation is made visible. But
this payment is made identical by the great religions of disillusion
with nothing other than the concrete condition from which the faithful
are to be saved. If the self is not impoverished, unkempt, and hungry,
in fact, it is made so. Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but
self-defilement is godliness; sainthood, if we are to trust the lives of
saints, whether in Asia or in Europe, is coincident with insanitation;
saintly virtues are depressed virtues,--humility, hope, meekness, pity;
and such conditions of life which define the holy ones are
unwholesome--poverty, asceticism, squalor, filth. Hence, by an ironic
inversion, religions of disillusion, being other-worldly, identify
escape from an actual unpropitious environment with submergence in it;
that being the visible and indispensable sign of an operative grace. So
the beatitudes: the blessed are the poor, the mourners, the meek.
Beginning as a correction of the evils of existence, religion ends by
offering an infallible avenue of escape from them through postulating a
desiderated type of existence which operates to gather the spirit to
itself. For this reason the value-forms of the spirituality or spiritual
control of the universe and of the immortality of the soul have been
very largely the practical concern of religion alone, since these are
the instruments indispensable to the attainment of salvation. In so far
forth religion has been an art and its institutional association with
the arts has been made one of its conspicuous justifications. So far,
however, as it has declared values to be operative without making them
actually existent it has been only a black art, a magic. It has ignored
the actual causes in the nature and history of things, and has
substituted for them non-existent desirable causes, ultimately reducible
to a single, eternal, beneficent spirit, omnipotent and free. To convert
these into existence, an operation which is the obvious intent of much
contemporary thinking in religion,[97] it must, however, give up the
assumption that they already exist _qua_ spirit. But when religion gives
up this assumption, religion gives up the ghost.

What it demands of the ghost, and of all hypostatized or
anthropomorphized ultimate value-forms, is that they shall work, and its
life as an institution depends upon making them work. Christian Science
becomes