and gentlemen for whom these comfortable sayings are prepared:  the vestrymen and pillars of the Church, with black frock coats and black kid gloves and shiny tophats; the ladies of Good Society with their Easter costumes in pastel shades, their gracious smiles and their sweet intoxicating odors.  I picture them as I have seen them at St. George’s, where that aged wild boar, Pierpont Morgan, the elder, used to pass the collection plate; at Holy Trinity, where they drove downtown in old-fashioned carriages with grooms and footmen sitting like twin statues of insolence; at St. Thomas’, where you might see all the “Four Hundred” on exhibition at once; at St. Mary the Virgin’s, where the choir paraded through the aisles, swinging costly incense into my childish nostrils, the stout clergyman walking alone with nose upturned, carrying on his back a jewelled robe for which some adoring female had paid sixty thousand dollars.  “Spiritual things come first?” Ah, yes!  “Seek first the kingdom of God, and the jewelled robes shall be added unto you!” And it is so dreadful about the French and German Socialists, who, as the “Churchman” reports, “make a creed out of materialism.”  But then, what is this I find in one issue of the organ of the “Church of Good Society”?

     Business men contribute to the Y.M.C.A. because they realize
     that if their employes are well cared for and religiously
     influenced, they can be of greater service in business!

Who let that material cat out of the spiritual bag?

* * * * *

#Book three#

#The Church of the Servant-girls#

  Was it for this—­that prayers like these
    Should spend themselves about thy feet,
  And with hard, overlabored knees
    Kneeling, these slaves of men should beat
  Bosoms too lean to suckle sons
  And fruitless as their orisons?

  Was it for this—­that men should make
    Thy name a fetter on men’s necks,
  Poor men made poorer for thy sake,
    And women withered out of sex? 
  Was it for this—­that slaves should be—­
  Thy word was passed to set men free?

  Swinburne.

* * * * *

#Charity#

As everyone knows, the “society lady” is not an independent and self-sustaining phenomenon.  For every one of these exquisite, sweet-smelling creatures that you meet on Fifth Avenue, there must be at home a large number of other women who live sterile and empty lives, and devote themselves to cleaning up after their luckier sisters.  But these “domestics” also are human beings; they have emotions—­or, in religious parlance, “souls;” it is necessary to provide a discipline to keep them from appropriating the property of their mistresses, also to keep them from becoming #enceinte.# So it comes about that there are two cathedrals in New York:  one, St. John the Divine, for the society ladies, and the other,