Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/269

Rh But as some good souls will still persist in believing in spooks, in spite of the failure of the not over-incredulous Society for Psychical Research to find a single really trustworthy specimen, it may be well to lay this ghost by a funeral logical rite or two.

To begin with, then, it is important to remember that to believers the means to a mystery is the mystery itself. For those addicted to such things do not follow them as sciences, but as arts. They have inherited the act embodied in certain actions, and the symbols in which it stands enshrined are to them essentials to its performance. From being so in act, they become so in fact. For so potent is faith, that to believe in a means as essential to an end is, by virtue of that belief alone, to make it so.

Now a mystery is not a thing a faith is in the habit of naïvely imparting to the first man it may chance to buttonhole for pious purposes, especially when it is a mystery of the utmost significance to itself. Every well-organized hierarchy has to keep up a certain amount of celestial exclusiveness for purposes of self-preservation. Just because by prolonged devotion it has secured