ecessity. In truth, necessity is
a transitory thing, and the time is coming when we shall be able to enjoy
one another's beauty without any lust."[54] Even in the sphere of sex he
would be willing to admit purity and beauty, apart from the inherited
influence of Adam's sin. In Paradise, he says, had Paradise continued, the
act of generation would have been as simple and free from shame as the act
of the hand in scattering seed on to the earth. "Sexual conjugation would
have been under the control of the will without any sexual desire. The
semen would be injected into the vagina in as simple a manner as the
menstrual fluid is now ejected. There would not have been any words which
could be called obscene, but all that might be said of these members would
have been as pure as what is said of the other parts of the body."[55]
That, however, for Augustine, is what might have been in Paradise where,
as he believed, sexual desire had no existence. As things are, he held, we
are right to be ashamed, we do well to blush. And it was natural that, as
Clement of Alexandria mentions, many heretics should have gone further on
this road and believed that while God made man down to the navel, the rest
was made by another power; such heretics have their descendants among us
even to-day.

Alike in the Eastern and Western Churches, however, both before and after
Augustine, though not so often after, great Fathers and teachers have
uttered opinions which recall those of Clement rather than of Augustine.
We cannot lay very much weight on the utterance of the extravagant and
often contradictory Tertullian, but it is worth noting that, while he
declared that woman is the gate of hell, he also said that we must
approach Nature with reverence and not with blushes. "Natura veneranda
est, non erubescenda." "No Christian author," it has indeed been said,
"has so energetically spoken against the heretical contempt of the body as
Tertullian. Soul and body, according to Tertullian, are in the closest
association. The soul is the life-principle of the body, but there is no
activity of the soul which is not manifested and conditioned by the
flesh."[56] More weight attaches to Rufinus Tyrannius, the friend and
fellow-student of St. Jerome, in the fourth century, who wrote a
commentary on the Apostles' Creed, which was greatly esteemed by the early
and mediaeval Church, and is indeed still valued even to-day. Here, in
answer to those who declared that the