It is the art-work of the folk-soul in the religious sphere.

Here man's inveterate creative faculty seizes on the raw material given him by religious-intuition, and constructs from it significant shapes.

We misunderstand, then, the whole character of religious symbolism if we either demand rationality from it, or try to adapt its imagery to the lucid and probably mistaken conclusions of the sophisticated, modern mind.
We are learning to recognize these primitive and racial elements in popular religion, and to endure their presence with tolerance; because they are necessary, and match a level of mental life which is still active in the race.

This more primitive life emerges to dominate all crowds--where the collective mental level is inevitably lower than that of the best individuals immersed in it--and still conditions many of our beliefs and deeds.

There is the propitiatory attitude to unseen Divine powers; which the primitive mind, in defiance of theology, insists on regarding as somehow hostile to us and wanting to be bought off.