even in the elites who also impute charisma to the rest of their society. It cannot do otherwise. It is too important, too serious a matter to do otherwise, even in secular societies. Authority is too crucial to the creation and maintenance of order to be able to avoid the sentiments that need and are evoked by order. The consequence is that large modern societies, even more than the large societies of the past, are enmeshed in a perpetual strain of competing conceptions about the ultimate locus of charisma. The discerners and interpreters of the transcendent order, the agents of earthly order, and the populace which wishes to share in these higher orders and already regards itself as sharing in them sufficiently, are bound to be engaged in a contest with each other. The earthly elite is under pressure from the charisma of the transcendent order and from charisma embodied in the populace. It can never avoid its attribution of charisma to its own central position but neither can it avoid contention, pressure, and criticism from the other bearers of charismatic qualities. And any improvement in the position of any one of the three contestants is bound to arouse and strengthen the affirmation of their own charisma in the other two, while at the same time laying it open to criticism and refusal. With these concluding but not definitive observations, we come again to Weber's famous proposition about the revolutionary character of charisma. As in so much else that he said, much truth resides. But the truth of the matter is more complicated, the phenomenon is more protean, and the distance to be traversed for its understanding is still very great.