ossessing a fund of traditional lore, a just
if somewhat encumbered conscience, and the gift of song. This chorus was
therefore much like the Christian Church and like that celestial choir
of which the church wishes to be the earthly echo. Like the church, the
tragic chorus had authority, because it represented a wide, if
ill-digested, experience; and it had solemnity, because it spoke in
archaic tropes, emotional and obscure symbols of prehistoric conflicts.
These sacramental forms retained their power to move in spite of their
little pertinence to living issues, partly on account of the mystery
which enshrouded their forgotten passion and partly on account of the
fantastic interpretations which that pregnant obscurity allowed.

[Sidenote: Oracles and revelations.]

Far more powerful, however, are those embodiments of the general
conscience which religion furnishes in its first and spontaneous phase,
as when the Hebrew prophets dared to cry, "So saith the Lord." Such
faith in one's own inspiration is a more pliable oracle than tradition
or a tragic chorus, and more responsive to the needs and changes of the
hour. Occidental philosophers, in their less simple and less eloquent
manner, have often repeated that arrogant Hebraic cry: they have told us
in their systems what God thinks about the world. Such pretensions would
be surprising did we not remind ourselves of the obvious truth that what
men attribute to God is nothing but the ideal they value and grope for
in themselves, and that the commandments, mythically said to come from
the Most High, flow in fact from common reason and local experience.

If history did not enable us to trace this derivation, the ever-present
practical standard for faith would sufficiently indicate it; for no one
would accept as divine a revelation which he felt to be immoral or found
to be pernicious. And yet such a deviation into the maleficent is always
possible when a code is uprooted from its rational soil and
transplanted into a realm of imagination, where it is subject to all
sorts of arbitrary distortions. If the sexual instinct should attach us
(as in its extensions and dislocations it sometimes does) to beings
incapable of satisfying it or of uniting with us in propagating the
race, we should, of course, study to correct that aberration so that our
joys and desires might march in step with the possible progress of the
world. In the same way, if the gregarious instinct should bring