, is dismissed by the average
male blockhead as no more than a feeble sentimentality. The truth is
that it is precisely the opposite. It is surely not sentimentality to be
moved by the stately and mysterious ceremony of the mass, or even, say,
by those timid imitations of it which one observes in certain Protestant
churches. Such proceedings, whatever their defects from the standpoint
of a pure aesthetic, are at all events vastly more beautiful than any of
the private acts of the folk who take part in them. They lift themselves
above the barren utilitarianism of everyday life, and no less above the
maudlin sentimentalities that men seek pleasure in. They offer a means
of escape, convenient and inviting, from that sordid routine of thought
and occupation which women revolt against so pertinaciously.

41. The Ethics of Women

I have said that the religion preached by Jesus (now wholly extinct
in the world) was highly favourable to women. This was not saying, of
course, that women have repaid the compliment by adopting it. They are,
in fact, indifferent Christians in the primitive sense, just as they are
bad Christians in the antagonistic modern sense, and particularly on the
side of ethics. If they actually accept the renunciations commanded
by the Sermon on the Mount, it is only in an effort to flout their
substance under cover of their appearance. No woman is really humble;
she is merely politic. No woman, with a free choice before her, chooses
self-immolation; the most she genuinely desires in that direction is
a spectacular martyrdom. No woman delights in poverty. No woman yields
when she can prevail. No woman is honestly meek.

In their practical ethics, indeed, women pay little heed to the precepts
of the Founder of Christianity, and the fact has passed into proverb.
Their gentleness, like the so-called honour of men, is visible only in
situations which offer them no menace. The moment a woman finds herself
confronted by an antagonist genuinely dangerous, either to her own
security or to the well-being of those under her protection--say a child
or a husband--she displays a bellicosity which stops at nothing, however
outrageous. In the courts of law one occasionally encounters a male
extremist who tells the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the
truth, even when it is against his cause, but no such woman has ever
been on view since the days of Justinian. It is, indeed, an axiom of the
bar that women i