"What can you do without your flounces? How can you live without your ruffles? Ay, how can you, without them, think, speak, or work? How can you eat, drink, walk, sleep, pray, worship, moralise, sentimentalise, or love, without them? Are you not ruffled and flounced when you first see the light, ruffled and flounced when you last see the darkness? The cradle and the tomb, are they not the first and last ruffles of Man? And between them what a panoramic display of flounces! What clean and attractive visible Edges of unclean invisible common Skirts! Look at your huge elaborate monuments, your fancy sepulchers, what are they but the ruffles of your triumphs and defeats? The marble flounces, these, of your cemeteries, your Pantheons and Westminster Abbeys. And what are your belfries and spires and chimes, your altars and reredoses and such like, but the sanctified flounces of your churches. No, these are not wholly adventitious sanctities; not empty, superfluous growths. They are incorporated into Life by Time, and they grow in importance as our Æsthetics become more inutile, as our Religions begin to exude gum and pitch for commerce, instead of bearing fruits of Faith and Love and Magnanimity. "The first church was the forest; the first dome, the welkin; the first altar, the sun. But that was, when man went forth in native buff, brother to the lion, not the ox, without ruffles and without faith. His spirit, in the course of time, was born; it grew and developed zenithward and nadirward, as the cycles rolled on. And in spiritual pride, and pride of power and wealth as well, it took to ruffling and flouncing to such an extent that at certain epochs it disappeared, dwindled into nothingness, and only the appendages remained. These were significant appendages, to be sure; not altogether adscititious. Ruffles these, indeed, endowed, as it were, with life, and growing on the dead Spirit, as the grass on the grave. "And is it not noteworthy that our life terrene at certain epochs seems to be made up wholly of these? That as the great Pine falls, the noxious weeds, the brambles and thorny bushes around it, grow quicker, lustier, luxuriating on the vital stores in the earth that were its own--is not this striking and perplexing, my rational friends? Surely, Man is neither the featherless biped of the Greek Philosopher, nor the tool-using animal of the Sage of Chelsea. For animals, too, have their tools, and man, in his visible flounces, has feathers enough to make even a peacock gape. Both my Philosophers have hit wide of the mark this time. And Man, to my way of thinking, is a flounce-wearing Spirit. Indeed, flounces alone, the invisible ones in particular, distinguish us from the beasts. For like ourselves they have their fashions in clothes; their peculiar speech; their own hidden means of intellection, and, to some extent, of imagination: but flounces they have not, they know not. These are luxuries, which Man alone enjoys.