The churches still have the pecuniary support of this
class; although the creeds to which the class adheres with the
greatest facility are relatively poor in anthropomorphic content.
At the same time the effective middle-class congregation tends,
in many cases, more or less remotely perhaps, to become a
congregation of women and minors. There is an appreciable lack of
devotional fervor among the adult males of the middle class,
although to a considerable extent there survives among them a
certain complacent, reputable assent to the outlines of the
accredited creed under which they were born. Their everyday life
is carried on in a more or less close contact with the industrial
process.
This peculiar sexual differentiation, which tends to
delegate devout observances to the women and their children, is
due, at least in part, to the fact that the middle-class women
are in great measure a (vicarious) leisure class. The same is
true in a less degree of the women of the lower, artisan classes.
They live under a regime of status handed down from an earlier
stage of industrial development, and thereby they preserve a
frame of mind and habits of thought which incline them to an
archaic view of things generally.
Pages:
389
390
391
392
393
394
395
396
397
398
399
400
401
402
403
404
405
406
407
408
409
410
411
412
413