And we strip them off at
our own peril: for this proceeding, grateful as it may be to our
intellects, may leave us face to face with a mystery which we dare not
look at, and cannot grasp.

So, cultus has done a mighty thing for humanity, in evolving and
conserving the system of symbols through which the Infinite and Eternal
can be in some measure expressed. The history of these symbols goes
back, as we now know, to the infancy of the race, and forward to the
last productions of the religious imagination; all of which bear the
image of our past They are like coins, varying in beauty, and often of
slight intrinsic value; but of enormous importance for our spiritual
currency, because accepted as the representatives of a real wealth. In
its symbols, the cultus preserves all the past levels of religious
response achieved by the race; weaving them into the fabric of religion,
and carrying them forward into the present. All the instinctive
movements of the primitive mind; its fear of the invisible, its
self-subjection, its trust in ritual acts, amulets, spells, sacrifices,
its tendency to localize Deity in certain places or shrines, to buy off
the unknown, to set up magicians and mediators, are represented in it.
Its function is racial more than individual. It is the art-work of the
folk-soul in the religious sphere. Here man's inveterate creative
faculty seizes on the raw material given him by religious-intuition, and
constructs from it significant shapes. We misunderstand, then, the whole
character of religious symbolism if we either demand rationality from
it, or try to adapt its imagery to the lucid and probably mistaken
conclusions of the sophisticated, modern mind.

We are learning to recognize these primitive and racial elements in
popular religion, and to endure their presence with tolerance; because
they are necessary, and match a level of mental life which is still
active in the race. This more primitive life emerges to dominate all
crowds--where the collective mental level is inevitably lower than that
of the best individuals immersed in it--and still conditions many of our
beliefs and deeds. There is the propitiatory attitude to unseen Divine
powers; which the primitive mind, in defiance of theology, insists on
regarding as somehow hostile to us and wanting to be bought off. There
is the whole idea and apparatus of sacrifice; even though no more than
the big apples and vegetable marrows of the harvest festival be