Excerpts from John Cowper Powys’ essay:
To regard religion as mythology does not make it less important. It gives it a new and lovely glamour. It restores to it the enchantment which it possessed at the beginning when its dogmas had not yet lost their natural poetry in the laboratory of theological speculation.
No cultivation of the æsthetic sense in the presence of life can afford to neglect some deliberate heightening and enhancing of the basic elements of our experience, such as birth, love, food, fire, shelter, procreation, death. And these are precisely the things that, as they present themselves one by one, Religion in its rôle of Mythology appropriates to itself and consecrates.