faith-world which is built up of them, with its angels and demons, its
sharply defined heaven and hell, the Divine personifications which
embody certain attributes of God for us, the purity and gentleness of
the Mother, the simplicity and infinite possibility of the Child, the
divine self-giving of the Cross;--more, the Lamb, the Blood and the Fire
of the revivalists, the oil and water, bread and wine, of a finished
Sacramentalism--all these may be regarded as the vestures placed by man,
at one stage or another of his progress, on the freely-given but
ineffable spiritual fact. Like other clothes, they have now become
closely identified with that which wears them. 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