What remains of the alleged piety of women is little more than a social
habit, reinforced in most communities by a paucity of other and more
inviting divertissements. If you have ever observed the women of Spain
and Italy at their devotions you need not be told how much the worship
of God may be a mere excuse for relaxation and gossip. These women, in
their daily lives, are surrounded by a formidable network of mediaeval
taboos; their normal human desire for ease and freedom in intercourse
is opposed by masculine distrust and superstition; they meet no
strangers; they see and hear nothing new. In the house of the Most High
they escape from that vexing routine. Here they may brush shoulders
with a crowd. Here, so to speak, they may crane their mental necks and
stretch their spiritual legs. Here, above all, they may come into some
sort of contact with men relatively more affable, cultured and charming
than their husbands and fathers—to wit, with the rev. clergy.
Elsewhere in Christendom, 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, 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.