Sentence:  Religion is everywhere a gauge of respectability. . . . The right to participate, however humbly, in His august and transcendental operations offers a powerful satisfaction to the will to power; the same privilege, on a smaller scale, is what takes hordes of human blanks into the Freemasons and other such <WSD>spookish</WSD> amalgamations of nonentities. 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  Frightening or unnerving in the manner of something eerie or supernatural; spooky.