But the ritual which is really complex, and many coloured, and elaborate,
and needlessly formal, is the ritual which people enact without
knowing it. It consists not of plain things like wine and fire,
but of really peculiar, and local, and exceptional, and ingenious things--
things like door-mats, and door-knockers, and electric bells,
and silk hats, and white ties, and shiny cards, and confetti.
The truth is that the modern man scarcely ever gets back to very old
and simple things except when he is performing some religious mummery.
The modern man can hardly get away from ritual except by entering
a ritualistic church. In the case of these old and mystical
formalities we can at least say that the ritual is not mere ritual;
that the symbols employed are in most cases symbols which belong to a
primary human poetry. The most ferocious opponent of the Christian
ceremonials must admit that if Catholicism had not instituted
the bread and wine, somebody else would most probably have done so.
Any one with a poetical instinct will admit that to the ordinary
human instinct bread symbolizes something which cannot very easily
be symbolized otherwise; that wine, to the ordinary human instinct,
symbolizes something which cannot very easily be symbolized otherwise.
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