A powerful religious apparatus compensates for a lack of justice and love. One can oppress the stranger, the widow, and the orphan and yet find edification in one’s beautiful religion. “Here is the Lord’s temple, here is the Lord’s temple!” The mystical flame of devotion can blind one to the absence of plain moral integrity. Yes, one can have religious power and profundity and enthusiasm and still be a very ordinary person, or even an unusually vulgar, mean person–which is a puzzle that has troubled many people already.
Leonhard Ragatz in Signs of the Kingdom: A Ragatz Reader, 34. (1917)