attention. We are all of us responsible to some extent for the
maintenance and enforcement of our laws. We are all of us, as
evolutionary science surely teaches, interested in the facts of
anthropology, however repellant some of these may be to our own
feelings. We cannot evade the conditions of _atavism_ and _heredity_.
Every family runs the risk of producing a boy or a girl whose life will
be embittered by inverted sexuality, but who in all other respects will
be no worse or better than the normal members of the home. Surely, then,
it is our duty and our interest to learn what we can about its nature,
and to arrive through comprehension at some rational method of dealing
with it.

I.

CHRISTIAN OPINION.

Since this enquiry is limited to actual conditions of contemporary life,
we need not discuss the various ways in which the phenomenon of sexual
inversion has been practically treated by races with whose habits and
religions we have no affinity.

On the other hand, it is of the highest importance to obtain a correct
conception of the steps whereby the Christian nations, separating
themselves from ancient paganism, introduced a new and stringent
morality into their opinion on this topic, and enforced their ethical
views by legal prohibitions of a very formidable kind.

Without prejudging or prejudicing this new morality, now almost
universally regarded as a great advance upon the ethics of the earlier
pagan world, we must observe that it arose when science was
non-existent, when the study of humanity had not emerged from the
cradle, and when theology was in the ascendant. We have therefore to
expect from it no delicate distinctions, no anthropological
investigations, no psychological analysis, and no spirit of toleration.
It simply decreed that what had hitherto been viewed as immorality at
worst should henceforth be classed among crimes against God, nature,
humanity, the state.

Opening the Bible, we find severe penalties attached to sexual inversion
by the Mosaic law, in the interests of population and in harmony with
the Jewish theory of abominations. The lesson is driven home by the
legend of two cities, Sodom and Gomorrah, overwhelmed with fire because
of their addiction to abnormal sexual indulgences. Here the _vindices
flammae_ of the Roman code appear for the first time--the stake and the
flames, which mediaeval legislation appointed for offenders of this sort.

St. Paul, penetrated with Hebrew