It is needless to point out the close analogy at
this point between the priestly office and the office of the
footman. It is pleasing to our sense of what is fitting in these
matters, in either case, to recognize in the obvious
perfunctoriness of the service that it is a pro forma execution
only. There should be no show of agility or of dexterous
manipulation in the execution of the priestly office, such as
might suggest a capacity for turning off the work.
In all this there is of course an obvious implication as to the
temperament, tastes, propensities, and habits of life imputed to
the divinity by worshippers who live under the tradition of these
pecuniary canons of reputability. Through its pervading men's
habits of thought, the principle of conspicuous waste has colored
the worshippers' notions of the divinity and of the relation in
which the human subject stands to him. It is of course in the
more naive cults that this suffusion of pecuniary beauty is most
patent, but it is visible throughout. All peoples, at whatever
stage of culture or degree of enlightenment, are fain to eke out
a sensibly scant degree of authentic formation
regarding the personality and habitual surroundings of their
divinities.
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