ommunity, it is felt that all levity and avowed zest
in the enjoyment of the good things of this world is alien to the true
clerical decorum. Whatever suggests that these servants of an invisible
master are living a life, not of devotion to their master's good fame,
but of application to their own ends, jars harshly on our sensibilities
as something fundamentally and eternally wrong. They are a servant
class, although, being servants of a very exalted master, they rank high
in the social scale by virtue of this borrowed light. Their consumption
is vicarious consumption; and since, in the advanced cults, their master
has no need of material gain, their occupation is vicarious leisure in
the full sense. "Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye
do, do all to the glory of God." It may be added that so far as the
laity is assimilated to the priesthood in the respect that they are
conceived to be servants of the divinity. So far this imputed vicarious
character attaches also to the layman's life. The range of application
of this corollary is somewhat wide. It applies especially to such
movements for the reform or rehabilitation of the religious life as
are of an austere, pietistic, ascetic cast--where the human subject is
conceived to hold his life by a direct servile tenure from his spiritual
sovereign. That is to say, where the institution of the priesthood
lapses, or where there is an exceptionally lively sense of the immediate
and masterful presence of the divinity in the affairs of life, there
the layman is conceived to stand in an immediate servile relation to
the divinity, and his life is construed to be a performance of vicarious
leisure directed to the enhancement of his master's repute. In such
cases of reversion there is a return to the unmediated relation of
subservience, as the dominant fact of the devout attitude. The emphasis
is thereby throw on an austere and discomforting vicarious leisure, to
the neglect of conspicuous consumption as a means of grace.

A doubt will present itself as to the full legitimacy of this
characterization of the sacerdotal scheme of life, on the ground that a
considerable proportion of the modern priesthood departs from the scheme
in many details. The scheme does not hold good for the clergy of
those denominations which have in some measure diverged from the old
established schedule of beliefs or observances. These take thought, at
least ostensibly or permissively, for th