as sacred, but the perversions, the
deceptions and the subterfuges which it entails. One instance, related
by a trained nurse who had been in attendance upon a girl sixteen
years of age, will suffice to illustrate this. The girl, encouraged by
her mother, related with amusement and satisfaction, how the child had
"sold her virtue" on seven different occasions, procuring for the
same, proven by the requisite evidences, sums which were considered
quite exorbitant in view of the fact that the market was always
over-crowded with similar sales.

Thus, the law of supply and demand is ever preserved; and human beings
keep right on selling their royal birthright for a mess of pottage;
inviting disease, decay and death when they might have glorious,
blissful life.

Mankind has failed to look for virtue in the interior nature; failed
to look for beauty of soul, being ever ready to pay the highest price
for the counterfeit, and the result is that a practice of mutual
deception has been the rule.

Some years ago, Thomas Hardy wrote a story about a girl in the
wretched environment of middle-class England. He called it the story
of a "pure woman," and his appraisal of the heroine as a pure woman
brought out a storm of reproach and horrified criticism, particularly
from the clergy, because it chanced that this poor girl had given
birth to a child out of wedlock; and notwithstanding that the author
made it quite clear that she had been the victim of circumstances and
coercion, the act itself condemned her to unchastity in the eyes of
the clerical critics.

When we contemplate the attitude which religious systems have ever
held toward women, we are amazed that the Church has been upheld
almost wholly by the female sex. The fact is accountable on one
hypothesis only: that of the spiritual insight, which recognized in
the story of the Holy Mother and the Child the _One primordial, and
indestructible key to salvation_--the birth of the god-man through the
recognition of the purity and joy of the perfect sex-union.

But, notwithstanding the medieval trend of religious mysticism (there
is a religious mysticism and a scientific mysticism) which seemed to
regard all human love as a weakness, when not actually sinful as in
sex-love, it is evident that sexual love, in its emotional, or psychic
aspect, was at the root of the "ecstacies" which are so ardently
described in ecclesiastical history as "evidences of saintliness."

If, instead o