religious revolution now 241and make down payments on the greater life. Otherwise, the doctrine
of the visionary teacher will fail to persuade or even to be understood.
By a synecdoche of the religious and po liti cal imagination, we grasp
the remote whole in the tangible part.
Th e found ers of the world religions taught by example and parable.
Th eir action was exemplary just as their discourse was parabolic. Not
content to embody their doctrines in examples to which many could
relate, they undertook to supply examples by action.
Th e examples in discourse and action had a constant characteristic:
they focused on some aspect of present experience, readily accessible to
any ordinary woman or man, embodying concerns and capabilities of
humanity that contained in themselves the beginnings or the clues of
the higher life to which they called their hearers.
What is immediately intelligible to any man or woman is some way
of seeing other individuals at close hand and of dealing with them in
the ordinary circumstances of life. Such a mode of vision and conduct
in the microcosm of personal encounter expresses an understanding of
our higher vocation and presages a change of life in every part of our
experience, from the intimate aspects of personality to our life in soci-
ety among strangers.
Th e union of visionary teaching with exemplary action is the ele-
ment of past religious revolution with which the revolutionaries of the
future cannot dispense. However, it must be combined with a practice
unknown to the religious revolutionaries of the past. Here are some of
the elements of such a practice.
In the fi rst place, with respect to the relation between leader and
led, a religious revolution faithful to the motives and aims that I have
here explored cannot carry out its task if it centralizes prophetic power
in a single individual and in his decisive action in history. It must de-
centralize the capability and the authority for continuing religious
innovation. In this respect, it is closest to rabbinical Judaism, to Confu-
cianism, and to the secular projects of po liti cal or personal liberation.
Unlike the Protestant Reformation, which stopped at proclaiming the
priesthood of all believers, it must recognize prophetic power in every-
one. It must therefore seek an approach to education that equips the
imagination with such power: for example, by addressing each sub-
ject from contrasting points of view and by stocking the mind with a