5 < rHAT sociologists and social anthropologists call the cultural \/\/ value or belief system of a society can be lived up to only T v partially, fragmentarily, intermittently and only in an approximate way. The ideals of prophets and saints can take root only when they are attenuated, moderated and compromised with other contradictory ideals and with the demands of the situation and the needs of 'the old Adam'. Ideals and beliefs can only influence conduct alongside of personal ties, primordial attachments, and responsibilities in corporate bodies and they can come into play primarily in the form of vague notions regarding the Right and Good in concrete forms. Sociologists and anthropologists might make it appear as if every man is implicitly a philosopher and a theologian with a coherent image of the cosmos and society and a hierarchy of standards of preference. This is, however, very far from the truth. Man is much more concerned with what is near at hand, with what is present and concrete than with what is remote and abstract. He is more responsive on the whole to persons, to the status of those who surround him and the justice which he sees in his own situation than he is with the symbols of remote persons, with the total status system in the society and with the global system of jusiice. Immediately present authorities engage his mind more than remote ones. The ordinary man is however not a complete idiot in the Greek sense. In a dormant way, semi-conscious and peripheral, he too responds to the central authoriiies and symbols of the society. From time to iime, as occasion reqllires, he comes more closely into contact with them; his consciousness is opened to them at election time, in times of naiional troubles, in great ceremonial occasions like the Coronaiion, in the same way in which an 'Easter asd Christmas' communicant enters into communion with divinity on these