Now here, as it seems to me, we have a great theological truth in a few words.  The elusive contacts and subtle realities of the world of spirit have got to wear something, if we are to grasp them at all.  Moreover, if the mass of men are to grasp them ever so little, they must wear something which is easily recognized by the human eye and human heart; more, by the primitive, half-conscious folk-soul existing in each one of us, stirring in the depths and reaching out in its own way towards God.  It is a delicate matter to discuss religious symbols.  They are like our intimate friends:  though at the bottom of our hearts we may know that they are only human, we hate other people to tell us so.  And, even as the love of human beings in its most perfect state passes beyond its immediate object, is transfigured, and merged in the nature of all love; so too, the devotion which a purely symbolic figure calls forth from the ardently religious nature—­whether this figure be the divine Krishna of Hinduism, the Buddhist’s Mother of Mercy, the S[=u]fi’s Beloved, or those objects of traditional Christian piety which are familiar to all of us—­this devotion too passes beyond its immediate goal and the relative truth there embodied, and is eternalized.  It is characteristic of the primitive mind that it finds a difficulty about universals, and is most at home with particulars.  The success of Christianity as a world-religion largely abides in the way in which it meets this need.  It is notorious that the person of Jesus, rather than the Absolute God, is the object of average Protestant devotion.  So too the Catholic peasant may find it easier to approach God through and in his special saint, or even a special local form of the Madonna.  This is the inevitable corollary of the psychic level at which he lives; and to speak contemptuously of his “superstition” is wholly beside the point.  Other great faiths have been compelled by experience to meet need of a particular object on which the primitive religious consciousness can fasten itself:  conspicuous examples being the development within Buddhism of the cult of the Great Mother, and within pore Brahminism of Krishna worship.  Wherever it may be destined to end, here it is that the life of the Spirit begins; emerging very gently from our simplest human impulses and needs.  Yet, since the Universal, the Idea, is manifested in each such particular, we need not refuse to allow that the mass of men do thus enjoy—­in a way that their psychic level makes natural to them—­their own measure of communion with the Creative Spirit of God; and already live according to their measure a spiritual life.