fect.
This class is at the same time not underfed nor over-worked to such an
extent as to leave no margin of energy for the work of adaptation.

The case of the lower or doubtful leisure class in America--the middle
class commonly so called--is somewhat peculiar. It differs in respect
of its devotional life from its European counterpart, but it differs in
degree and method rather than in substance. 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. At the same time they stand in
no such direct organic relation to the industrial process at large as
would tend strongly to break down those habits of thought which, for the
modern industrial purpose, are obsolete. That is to say, the peculiar
devoutness of women is a particular expression of that conservatism
which the women of civilized communities owe, in great measure, to their
economic position. For the modern man the patriarchal relation of status
is by no means the dominant feature of life; but for the women on the
other hand, and for the upper middle-class women especially, confined
as they are by prescription and by economic circumstances to their
"domestic sphere," this relation is the most real and most formative
factor of life. Hence a habit of mind favorable to devout observances
and to the interpretation of the f