ir own attitudes, but let
them consult their orthodox authorities.

One must distinguish clearly here between what is held to be sacred or
sinful in itself and what is held to be one's duty or a nation's duty
because it is in itself the wisest, cleanest, clearest, best thing to
do. By the latter tests and reasonable arguments most or all of our
institutions regulating the relations of the sexes may be justifiable.
But my case is not whether they can be justified by these tests but
that it is not by these tests that they are judged even to-day, by the
professors of the chief religions of the world. It is the temper and not
the conclusions of the religious bodies that I would criticise. These
sexual questions are guarded by a holy irascibility, and the most
violent efforts are made--with a sense of complete righteousness--to
prohibit their discussion. That fury about sexual things is only to be
explained on the hypothesis that the Christian God remains a sex God in
the minds of great numbers of his exponents. His disentanglement from
that plexus is incomplete. Sexual things are still to the orthodox
Christian, sacred things.

Now the God whom those of the new faith are finding is only mediately
concerned with the relations of men and women. He is no more sexual
essentially than he is essentially dietetic or hygienic. The God of
Leviticus was all these things. He is represented as prescribing the
most petty and intimate of observances--many of which are now habitually
disregarded by the Christians who profess him. . . . It is part of the
evolution of the idea of God that we have now so largely disentangled
our conception of him from the dietary and regimen and meticulous sexual
rules that were once inseparably bound up with his majesty. Christ
himself was one of the chief forces in this disentanglement, there is
the clearest evidence in several instances of his disregard of the
rule and his insistence that his disciples should seek for the spirit
underlying and often masked by the rule. His Church, being made of baser
matter, has followed him as reluctantly as possible and no further
than it was obliged. But it has followed him far enough to admit his
principle that in all these matters there is no need for superstitious
fear, that the interpretation of the divine purpose is left to the
unembarrassed intelligence of men. The church has followed him far
enough to make the harsh threatenings of priests and ecclesiastics
ag