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 involved
in it. There is the continued belief in a Deity who can and should be
persuaded to change the weather, or who punishes those who offend Him by
famine, earthquake and pestilence. Vestigial relics of all these phases
can still be discovered in the Book of Common Prayer. There is further
the undying vogue of the religious amulet. There is the purely magical
efficacy which some churches attribute to their sacraments, rites,
shrines, liturgic formulæ and religious objects; others, to the texts of
their scriptures.[128] These things, and others like them, are not only
significant survivals from the past. They also represent the religious
side of something that continues active in us at present. Since, then,
it should clearly be the object of all spiritual endeavor to win the
whole man and not only his reason for God, speaking to his instincts in