which took the
best of physical manhood; and the cheapness of women, every man of
wealth having as many slave women as he could house and feed; the
orgies where women, both bound and free, were openly debauched; all
these evidences of the utter degradation to which the pure and
beautiful function of sex had sunk, called for a revulsion; and it
came in the idea of asceticism--an instance where the remedy was worse
than the disease. The mental attitude that resulted in asceticism was
not one in which the sex function was lifted from the mire of
licentiousness in which it lay; rather it was abandoned altogether as
something vile and unclean; and that too, unhappily, by those who
should have known better.

The Roman Church, in full accord with the type of Roman mind which
fostered it, still harbored the perverted idea that women were
inferior. And it is from the Roman Church of today rather more than
from any other of the phases of Christian Orthodoxy, that we note a
militant opposition to woman suffrage, and all the other avenues of
woman's claim to free expression.

While retaining all the old Roman's disrespect for woman, the Church
instituted and fostered celibacy, as a way out of the old profiligacy,
but as though by a sort of spiritual irony, the Church has retained,
from its "pagan" ancestors, the sex-worshippers, the idol of the Holy
Virgin. And despite the bombardments of criticism from without and the
inculcation of superstitious ignorance from within, the pure-hearted
children of the Church have always gone to the "Holy Mother" for their
comfort; and thus the eternal fires of Truth have smouldered beneath
the ashes of perverted mysticism throughout the Dark Ages that are
gone and the scarcely lighter Dawn that is here. Those who have eyes
to see, realize that the one worth-while thing which the old,
nearly-blind Church has been unwittingly doing all the time, has been
to hold to this central truth of all Life--religious, social,
national, and domestic--the truth that it is only by exalting the
maternal function of human life, that we can hope to reach the saviour
of mankind.

And, lest there be still some misconception of what we consider to be
the true "saviour" of mankind, we will again state, even as the Church
itself states it, "the babe of Bethlehem"--the pure Love between one
man and one woman; the "twain made one," which is the only saviour
that ever was or ever will be--the pure Christ-child that is