Page:You Gentiles (1924) by Maurice Samuel 1895-1972.djvu/47

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Sport

It is therefore unjust to treat this aspect of your life flippantly: you yourselves often fail to recognize (except in unacknowledged instinct) how deeply it is rooted in your life. In having sundered it from the overt and organized homage which you pay to spiritual values (in the church, that is) you have split yourselves. Hence the comparative weakness of your organized churches, which are founded on a misconception. Sport is for you a serious spiritual matter. It is the proper symbolization, the perfect ritual, wherein your spiritual forces, finding expression, also find exercise and sustenance. They were cleaner-witted who, before the advent of Christianity, associated sport intimately with your religious life. To-day you are practising on a vast scale the troubled hypocrisy of unhappy converts who have been convinced in reason of a new religion, but whose proper and healthy instincts drive them to surreptitious homage to older gods. Were sport given its right place again in your acknowledged spiritual institution, the

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