As
this disintegration proceeds, there come to be associated and
blended with the devout attitude certain other motives and
impulses that are not always of an anthropomorphic origin, nor
traceable to the habit of personal subservience. Not all of these
subsidiary impulses that blend with the habit of devoutness in
the later devotional life are altogether congruous with the
devout attitude or with the anthropomorphic apprehension of the
sequence of phenomena. The origin being not the same, their
action upon the scheme of devout life is also not in the same
direction. In many ways they traverse the underlying norm of
subservience or vicarious life to which the code of devout
observations and the ecclesiastical and sacerdotal institutions
are to be traced as their substantial basis. Through the presence
of these alien motives the social and industrial regime of status
gradually disintegrates, and the canon of personal subservience
loses the support derived from an unbroken tradition. Extraneous
habits and proclivities encroach upon the field of action
occupied by this canon, and it presently comes about that the
ecclesiastical and sacerdotal structures are partially converted
to other uses, in some measure alien to the purposes of the
scheme of devout life as it stood in the days of the most
vigorous and characteristic development of the priesthood.
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