t acts are concerned, women are far "purer"
than men. It is only when we leave the sphere of outward acts and
enter the sphere of cerebral undercurrents, that all this is changed.
There the Biblical story finds its proof, and the daughters of Eve
revert to their mother. This is the secret of that mania for the
personal which characterizes women's conversation. She can say
fine things and do fine work; but both in her wit and her art, one is
conscious of a mind that has voluptuously welcomed, or vindictively
repulsed, the approach of a particular invasion; never of a mind that,
in its abstract love for the beautiful, cannot even remember how it
came to give birth to such thoughts!

It is the close psychological association between the emotion of
religion and the emotion of sex which has always made women
more religious than men.

This is perhaps only to say that women are nearer the secret of the
universe than men. It may well be so. Man's rationalizing tendency
to divorce his intelligence from his intuition--may not be the precise
key which opens those magic doors! _Sanctity_ itself--that most
exquisite flower of the art of character--is a profoundly feminine
thing. The most saintly saints, that is to say those who wear the
indescribable distinction of their Master, are always possessed of a
certain feminine quality.

Sanctity is woman's ideal--morality is man's. The one is based upon
passion, and by means of love lifts us above law. The other is based
upon vice and the recoil from vice; and has no horizons of any sort.

That is why the countries where the imagination is profoundly
feminine like Russia and France have sanctity as their ideal.
Whereas England has its Puritan morality, and Germany its
scientific efficiency. These latter races ought to sit at Dante's feet, to
learn the secret of the "Beatific Vision" that is as far beyond
morality as it is outside science. There are, it is true, certain
moments when the Italian poet leads us up into the cold rarified air
of that "Intellectual Love of God" which leaves sex, as it leaves
other human feelings, infinitely behind. But this Spinozistic mood is
not the natural climate of his soul. He is always ready to revert,
always anxious to "drag Beatrice in." Wagner's "Parsifal" is perhaps
the most flagrant example of this ambiguous association between
religion and sex. The sentimental blasphemy of that feet-washing
scene is an evidence of the depths of sexual morbidity