The Sphere of Religion 293 



was the threat of suffering or the fear of death. He might still 

 fear what could only kill the body and his judgement of sacredness 

 might still relate itself to that fear, but if there was something in 

 his experience more sacred than life, the fear of death as the final 

 ill was conquered in principle : and this victory is the condition 

 of all progress, for there is no real spiritual good possible at lower 

 cost than the hazard of our material life, nor any impossible at that 

 price. 



This relation of the judgement of the sacred to human progress 

 is obscured by the frequent use of its sanction to defend reaction. 

 A belief or custom is fixed with all its present material associations 

 by being regarded as sacred. Then it becomes a sort of fenced city 

 from which it is hard to escape and which can resist attacks both of 

 right and reason. Instead of leading men into a world of free 

 ideas in which the sacred liberates itself from material bonds, 

 sacredness is invoked on behalf of these associations. Thereupon, 

 we have an idolatry which is the worst form of reaction and a 

 " yoke of bondage." 



But men can misuse anything, and the possibility of good is 

 usually the measure of the possibility of evil. Moreover, it is on 

 the steepest road that the temptation to make our progress the 

 justification for resting where we are is strongest. Wherefore, 

 the misuse of the sacred to arrest progress is no disproof of its 

 importance as the spring of the specially human evolution. Nor 

 does the fact that reaction is mainly a return to its material form, or 

 at least a maintaining of it when greater freedom offers, disprove 

 the importance even of the material sacred as a necessary stage of 

 progress, because influences are like persons who have the more 

 power to arrest progress if they have been effective to advance it. 



Both results we can see plainly in the religion of Israel. The 

 prophets, j ust because their higher truths were sacred and required 

 all their devotion, emancipated religion from material associations, 

 in a way unparalleled elsewhere. These associations, which were 

 sacred in the popular mind and were defended as such, the prophets 

 denounced as idolatry, and found it the chief hindrance to the 

 discernment of spiritual progress and what they regarded as the 

 true sacred : but, nevertheless, even the prophetic religion had 

 itself travelled through a stage at which the judgement of a 

 sacredness above life had been embodied in material objects like 

 the ark. 



