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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 against what they are pleased to consider impurity
or sexual impiety, a profound inconsistency. One seems to hear
their distant protests when one reads of Christ and the Magdalen, or
of Christ eating with publicans and sinners. The clergy of our own
days play the part of the New Testament Pharisees with the utmost
exactness and complete unconsciousness. One cannot imagine a modern
ecclesiastic conversing with a Magdalen in terms of ordinary
civility, unless she was in a very high social position indeed, or
blending with disreputable characters without a dramatic sense of
condescension and much explanatory by-play. Those who profess
modern religion do but follow in these matters a course entirely
compatible with what has survived of the authentic teachings of
Christ, when they declare that God is not sexual, and that religious
passion and insult and persecution upon the score of sexual things
are a barbaric inheritance.
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