Because there will be no paid sacerdotal class, there will be no public prayers in the ideal religion. Man's mental and emotional traffic with the higher power will be a private and personal one. Therefore there will be no empty show of religiosity for the benefit of his neighbours, no chance for hypocrisy to parade itself as devotion, no mechanical phonographic repetition of phrases which time or familiarity has divested of emotional significance and mental content. For although a congregation may gather in a public building, the prayers it will silently utter, the devotions it will silently perform, will not follow a set collective form but will be quite individual. Furthermore no separate order of clergy will be set apart from or be permitted to dominate over the laity, but a democratic basis of mutual consultation will support. Thus it was a sixteenth-century German, Sebastian Franck, who wrote in one of his books that a minister of the Gospel should resign his living when he finds that his sermons bear no spiritual fruit in changed lives. Franck himself soon demonstrated his sincerity by following his own advice. The old religious faith found itself at war with reason; the ideal faith will look to reason as an ally in its own camp. That is why the religious society which is to express such a faith will inevitably refuse to submit itself to any priesthood. But this is not to say that it is to submit itself to a completely democratic system. How could it, when the tenets which it holds speak plainly of the spiritual inequality of man, of the distinctions which show themselves in moral outlook and intellectual equipment? It will find an alternative way between these two extremes, the way of honorary, unpaid, inspired expositors. It will be the birth of a new priesthood, a priesthood that could give men the inner peace they hunger for, that could inspire them with the wisdom and courage to tackle personal problems rightly, and that could show them that there is something back of life worth living for; it would not need to mortgage its services to the State. It would get all its needs voluntarily satisfied by those whom it helped. But if it could not really help men, then its failure would eventually become its own scourge. People do not want empty puerile words alone; they want new hope and new faith that their problems will be solved and life's essential worth can be found.
-- Notebooks Category 17: The Religious Urge > Chapter 7 : Beyond Religion As We Know It > # 46
