ounded by a great number of servitors. In
the common run of such presentations of the celestial abodes, the office
of this corps of servants is a vicarious leisure, their time and efforts
being in great measure taken up with an industrially unproductive
rehearsal of the meritorious characteristics and exploits of the
divinity; while the background of the presentation is filled with the
shimmer of the precious metals and of the more expensive varieties of
precious stones. It is only in the crasser expressions of devout fancy
that this intrusion of pecuniary canons into the devout ideals reaches
such an extreme. An extreme case occurs in the devout imagery of the
Negro population of the South. Their word-painters are unable to descend
to anything cheaper than gold; so that in this case the insistence on
pecuniary beauty gives a startling effect in yellow--such as would be
unbearable to a soberer taste. Still, there is probably no cult in which
ideals of pecuniary merit have not been called in to supplement the
ideals of ceremonial adequacy that guide men's conception of what is
right in the matter of sacred apparatus.

Similarly it is felt--and the sentiment is acted upon--that the priestly
servitors of the divinity should not engage in industrially productive
work; that work of any kind--any employment which is of tangible human
use--must not be carried on in the divine presence, or within the
precincts of the sanctuary; that whoever comes into the presence should
come cleansed of all profane industrial features in his apparel
or person, and should come clad in garments of more than everyday
expensiveness; that on holidays set apart in honor of or for communion
with the divinity no work that is of human use should be performed by
any one. Even the remoter, lay dependents should render a vicarious
leisure to the extent of one day in seven. In all these deliverances of
men's uninstructed sense of what is fit and proper in devout observance
and in the relations of the divinity, the effectual presence of the
canons of pecuniary reputability is obvious enough, whether these canons
have had their effect on the devout judgment in this respect immediately
or at the second remove.

These canons of reputability have had a similar, but more far-reaching
and more specifically determinable, effect upon the popular sense
of beauty or serviceability in consumable goods. The requirements of
pecuniary decency have, to a very appreciable