The introjection of symboling into primate social life was revolutionary. Everything was transformed, everything acquired new meaning; the symbol added a new dimension to primate—now human—existence. An ax was no longer merely a tool with which to chop; it could become a symbol of authority. Mating became marriage, and all social relationships between parents and children and brothers and sisters became moral obligations, duties, rights, and privileges. The world of nature, from the stones beside the path to the stars in their courses, became alive and conscious spirits. “And all that I beheld respired with inward meaning” (Wordsworth). The anthropoid had at last become a man.

Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?

Marx was wrong. Religion is not the opiate of the people. Opium suggests something soporific, numbing, dulling. Too often religion has been an aphrodisiac for horror, a Benzedrine for bestiality. At its best it has lifted spirits and raised spires. At its worst it has turned entire civilizations into cemeteries.

The ten thousand men and women, children and patriarchs assembled there felt no different—they grew weak as young maidens who have succumbed to the charms of a lover. They were overcome by a powerful sense of goodwill, of tenderness, of crazy, childish infatuation, yes, God help them, of love for this little homicidal man, and they were unable, unwilling to do anything about it. It was like a fit of weeping you cannot fight down, like tears that have been held back too long and rise up from deep within you, dissolving whatever resists them, liquefying it, and flushing it away. These people were now pure liquid, their spirits and minds were melted; nothing was left but an amorphous liquid, and all they could feel was their hearts floating and sloshing about within them, and they laid those hearts, each man, each woman, in the hands of the little man in the blue frock coat, for better or for worse. They loved him.