brings a hidden thrill that as far back as I can remember I knew this
atmosphere of urbanity, that twice every Sunday those melodious and
hypnotizing incantations were chanted in my childish ears! I take up
the book of ritual, done in aristocratic black leather with gold
lettering, and the old worn volume brings me strange stirrings of
recollected awe. But I endeavor to repress these vestigial emotions
and to see the volume--not as a message from God to Good Society, but
as a landmark of man's age-long struggle against myth and dogma used
as a source of income and a shield to privilege.

In the beginning, of course, the priest and the magician ruled the
field. But today, as I examine this "Book of Common Prayer", I
discover that there is at least one spot out of which he has been
cleared entirely; there appears no prayer to planets to stand still,
or to comets to go away. The "Church of Good Society" has discovered
astronomy! But if any astronomer attributes this to his instruments
with their marvelous accuracy, let him at least stop to consider my
"economic interpretation" of the phenomenon--the fact that the
heavenly bodies affect the destinies of mankind so little that there
has not been sufficient emolument to justify the priest in holding on
to his job as astrologer.

But when you come to the field of meteorology, what a difference! Has
any utmost precision of barometer been able to drive the priest out of
his prerogatives as rainmaker? Not even in the most civilized of
countries; not in that most decorous and dignified of institutions,
the Protestant Episcopal Church of America! I study with care the
passage wherein the clergyman appears as controller of the fate of
crops. I note a chastened caution of phraseology; the church will not
repeat the experience of the sorcerer's apprentice, who set the demons