Spiritual systems of penance have sometimes been impugned for aiming at subduing nature: taming the passions, restraining the expression of strong emotion, weaning the body from innocent indulgences, and so forth. But is there any more barefaced destroyer of nature than “society” as at present constituted? Are there any penances harder, any restraints stricter, than those imposed by our conventional code? The spiritual struggle with nature is voluntary, and aims at subduing our lower nature, only the more to honor the intellectual principle, and render its exercise freer from clogging and degrading influences. The conventional struggle with nature, on the contrary, is a compulsory one, into which you are thrust by others in early and unconscious childhood; it is, moreover, a deceptive one, as it tends to produce mere appearances—not to tame passion, but restrain its outward expression; not to elevate the mind, but to give it the semblance of those gifts most profitable in the social estimation of the day. It does not tend to make man _super_natural, but _un_natural. It takes from him even the freedom of the savage, without giving him in exchange the freedom of the Christian. It aims not at virtue, but at decorum. Its morality skips the whole of the Ten Commandments, but insists upon what facetious Englishmen sometimes call the eleventh—_i.e._, “Thou shalt not be found out.” It has rites and ceremonials of its own, more arbitrary than the law of the land, and, in the same breath, more lax; it has beliefs and formulas more binding outwardly than those of any religion; it has its own oracles, its own language, its own tribunals. It is a state within a state, condoning many moral delinquencies, exalting some into meritorious deeds, smoothing others over as pardonable follies. Where it is not wicked, it is inane or spiteful. Slander and gossip are its breath of life, except in the few instances where intrigue sweeps away such second‐rate _passe‐temps_.