H E is religious to whom something is holy’. The most basic experience of man is the impact upon his own .person of power from without. Towards the ultimate source (or sources) of this power he cannot be indifferent. He may react in one of two ways: he may regard it as something to be controlled and used, or as something to be served and propitiated. The first of these reactions is condemned by religion as such. It is the attitude defined as hybris, arrogance. Man attempts to place himself above the ‘Source of Power’ instead of acknowledging himself its lowly servant.

‘You said in your heart,
I will climb the heavens,
I will raise up my throne
Above the stars of God.’ (Isaias xiv, 13.)

The essence of religion consists in the second kind of reaction. Man feels himself confronted with an Other Being, one which wholly transcends himself and his own small circumstances, yet one from which constant impacts upon himself and his world are being experienced. The idea of holiness is in fact derived from these two elemental intuitions of Otherness and of Power. The holy is that which controls and transcends the profane, ‘a Being of Power, strange and of a different order, dangerous and lifegiving, terrifying and repelling and at the same time attractive, far away and near at hand, full of mystery’. The impact upon his awareness of such a ‘Being of Power’ summons man to acknowledge its sublimity on the one hand and his own lowly dependence on the other. Worship is man’s ‘Complete Responser to this summons, the response of religion to holiness.