endom, though women are not quite so relentlessly
watched and penned up, they feel much the same need of variety and
excitement, and both are likewise on tap in the temples of the Lord.
No one, I am sure, need be told that the average missionary society
or church sewing circle is not primarily a religious organization. Its
actual purpose is precisely that of the absurd clubs and secret orders
to which the lower and least resourceful classes of men belong: it
offers a means of refreshment, of self-expression, of personal display,
of political manipulation and boasting, and, if the pastor happens to be
interesting, of discreet and almost lawful intrigue. In the course of a
life largely devoted to the study of pietistic phenomena, I have never
met a single woman who cared an authentic damn for the actual heathen.
The attraction in their salvation is always almost purely social. Women
go to church for the same reason that farmers and convicts go to church.

Finally, there is the aesthetic lure. Religion, in most parts of
Christendom, holds out the only bait of beauty that the inhabitants are
ever cognizant of. It offers music, dim lights, relatively ambitious
architecture, eloquence, formality and mystery, the caressing
meaninglessness that is at the heart of poetry. Women are far more
responsive to such things than men, who are ordinarily quite as devoid
of aesthetic sensitiveness as so many oxen. The attitude of the typical
man toward beauty in its various forms is, in fact, an attitude of
suspicion and hostility. He does not regard a work of art as merely
inert and stupid; he regards it as, in some indefinable way, positively
offensive. He sees the artist as a professional voluptuary and
scoundrel, and would no more trust him in his household than he would
trust a coloured clergyman in his hen-yard. It was men, and not women,
who invented such sordid and literal faiths as those of the Mennonites,
Dunkards, Wesleyans and Scotch Presbyterians, with their antipathy to
beautiful ritual, their obscene buttonholing of God, their great talent
for reducing the ineffable mystery of religion to a mere bawling of
idiots. The normal woman, in so far as she has any religion at all,
moves irresistibly toward Catholicism, with its poetical obscurantism.
The evangelical Protestant sects have a hard time holding her. She can
no more be an actual Methodist than a gentleman can be a Methodist.

This inclination toward beauty, of course