ll know each other in Truth." The
religionist has long looked for a time when, as prophesied by St.
Paul, who was above all things a spiritually-conscious person, "we
shall see each other face to face; not as now through a glass,
darkly."

This tendency to "get behind the scenes" as it were, to penetrate the
crust of mere outward semblance, and to reveal the interior nature,
may be seen even in the fashions of our clothes. Despite thunders of
denunciation from the self-constituted keepers of our morals, who are
not yet free from the bondage of traditional ideas of virtue and
"respectability," women have insisted upon freedom of the body in
dress until at last the uncorseted, short-skirted, thinly-clad woman
excites little adverse comment. The fact has at last established
itself that the female form has legs.

This fact was only half suspected before; men have always wanted to
see exactly what was beneath those long flowing skirts; and woman has
always known that she possessed at least one trump card, in the game
of enslaving man to become what modern slang has so aptly labeled her
"meal-ticket." She could always keep him guessing as to whether or not
she had legs; and the average man, be it known, possesses a fund of
curiosity far in excess of that which is proverbially ascribed to
woman. Men have been known to pay the highest price, even to donning
the matrimonial yoke, to satisfy their curiosity. Women have always
known this, and the worldly wise mother has besought her marriageable
daughter to "keep her skirts well over her ankles" if she hoped to
secure a man as a permanent banker! It does sound crude expressed
thus, but this is the basis upon which at least nine-tenths of the
respectable marriages of society are consummated. And this is the
standard which the short-sighted keepers of public morals would have
us retain. They would force women to act as though their bodies are
vile. They would keep the mind encumbered with the corpse of an idea
of modesty, from which the spirit has long since fled. The spirit has
fled from it because it was a false idea of modesty; because it was
founded upon the idea that woman was an instrument of the devil
himself, and that to look upon her naked form was in itself wicked,
and only permitted to poor man as a concession to his own innate
defilement.

The good Church at one time, not so far distant, refused to admit
women to the communion table in the "holy sacrament." A fine ch