other directions. In the
early days of the American community the prevailing denominations
started out with a ritual and paraphernalia of an austere simplicity;
but it is a matter familiar to every one that in the course of time
these denominations have, in a varying degree, adopted much of the
spectacular elements which they once renounced. In a general way, this
development has gone hand in hand with the growth of the wealth and the
ease of life of the worshippers and has reached its fullest expression
among those classes which grade highest in wealth and repute.

The causes to which this pecuniary stratification of devoutness is
due have already been indicated in a general way in speaking of
class differences in habits of thought. Class differences as regards
devoutness are but a special expression of a generic fact. The lax
allegiance of the lower middle class, or what may broadly be called the
failure of filial piety among this class, is chiefly perceptible among
the town populations engaged in the mechanical industries. In a general
way, one does not, at the present time, look for a blameless filial
piety among those classes whose employment approaches that of the
engineer and the mechanician. These mechanical employments are in a
degree a modern fact. The handicraftsmen of earlier times, who served
an industrial end of a character similar to that now served by the
mechanician, were not similarly refractory under the discipline of
devoutness. The habitual activity of the men engaged in these branches
of industry has greatly changed, as regards its intellectual discipline,
since the modern industrial processes have come into vogue; and the
discipline to which the mechanician is exposed in his daily employment
affects the methods and standards of his thinking also on topics which
lie outside his everyday work. Familiarity with the highly organized and
highly impersonal industrial processes of the present acts to derange
the animistic habits of thought. The workman's office is becoming more
and more exclusively that of discretion and supervision in a process of
mechanical, dispassionate sequences. So long as the individual is the
chief and typical prime mover in the process; so long as the obtrusive
feature of the industrial process is the dexterity and force of the
individual handicraftsman; so long the habit of interpreting phenomena
in terms of personal motive and propensity suffers no such considerable
and consis