its name implies, is a mere matter of custom, and therefore varies with
the variations of races and climates. It has nothing to do with
spirituality, and, in fact, the best morals are often the least
spiritual, and _vice versa_. It will be understood then that any force
which is apt to disturb this moral, or more exactly speaking social,
order will meet at once with the opposition of organized "religions" so
called, and the more spiritual it is, the greater will be the
opposition, for it will thus be the more dangerous.

Now one begins to see why Beauty is necessarily the bugbear, more or
less, of all religions, or, as I prefer to regard them, "organized
moralities"; for Beauty is neither moral nor immoral, being as she is a
purely spiritual force, with no relations to man's little schemes of
being good and making money and being knighted and so forth. For those
who have eyes to see, she is the supreme spiritual vision vouchsafed to
us upon the earth--and, as that, she is necessarily the supreme danger
to that materialistic use and wont by which alone a materialistic
society remains possible. For this reason our young men and
maidens--particularly our young men--must be guarded against her, for
her beauty sets us adream, prevents our doing our day's work, makes us
forget the soulless occupations in which we wither away our lives. The
man who loves beauty will never be mayor of his city, or even sit on the
Board of Aldermen. Nor is he likely to own a railroad, or be a captain
of industry. Nor will he marry, for her money, a woman he does not love.
The face of beauty makes all such achievements seem small and absurd.
Such so-called successes seem to him the dreariest forms of failure. In
short, Beauty has made him divinely discontented with the limited human
world about him, divinely incapable of taking it seriously, or heeding
its standards or conditions. No wonder society should look upon Beauty
as dangerous, for she is constantly upsetting its equilibrium and