In the realm of doing the waking-consciousness takes charge only when it becomes _technique_. Religious knowledge, too, is power--man is not only ascertaining causations, but handling them. He who knows the secret relationship between microcosm and macrocosm commands it also, whether the knowledge has come to him by revelation or by eavesdropping. Thus the magician and conjuror is truly the Taboo-man. He compels the deity through sacrifice and prayer; he practises the true rites and sacraments because they are causes of inevitable results, and whosoever knows them, him they must serve. He reads in the stars and in the sacred books; in his power lies, timeless and immune from all accident, the _causal_ relation of sin and propitiation, repentance and absolutions, sacrifice and grace. His chain of sacred origins and results makes him himself a vessel of mysterious power and, therefore, a cause of new effects, in which one must have faith before one may have them imparted. From this starting-point we can understand (what the European-American world of to-day has wellnigh forgotten) the ultimate meaning of religious ethics, _Moral_. It is, wherever true and strong, a relation that has the full import of _ritual act and practice_; it is (to use Loyola’s phrase) “_exercitium spirituale_,” performed before the deity,[473] who is to be softened and conjured thereby. “What shall I do to be saved?” This “what?” is the key to the understanding of all real moral. In its deeps there is ever a “wherefore” and a “why,” even in the case of those few sublimate philosophers who have imagined a moral that is “for its own sake”--confessing in the very phrase that deep down they feel a “wherefore,” even though but a sympathetic few of their own kind can appreciate it. _There is only causal moral_--that is, _ethical technique_--on the background of a convinced metaphysic.