le
weariness, and then the end. They do not realise or ever desire love
in its full joy of personal surrender. So, too, many women never, save
in some time of personal bewilderment, desire or seek salvation. But
such aimlessness brings its own emptiness, and women strain and seek
towards the god-head. For the truth remains, woman's need of love is
greater than man's need, and for this reason, where love fails her,
her desire for salvation is deeper than man's desire. And here again,
and once again, we see the difference between the sexes. The woman
pays the higher price for her implicit, unquestioning, and unconscious
obedience to Nature. And society has made the payment still heavier.
Let us for this last pity women! The dice they have had to throw in
the game of life is their sex, and they have only been allowed one
throw, and when they have thrown wastefully--yes, it is here that
religion has entered into the game. It may almost be said to measure
the failures and false boundaries in women's loves. The songs of love
and the songs of faith are alike; and women act worship as also they
are often driven to act love. The woman who knows her own heart must
know that this is true. And one cannot wish to see the opium of
religion taken from women until the game is made a fairer one for them
to play.

There is another point to consider.

Many great thinkers have striven against this profound and primitive
connection between the bodily and spiritual impulses, which has seemed
to them an intrusion of evil, impairing their pure spirituality by the
sexual life. They have thus recommended and followed asceticism in
order to arrive at a heightened spirituality. The error here is
obvious. The spiritual activities cannot be divided from the physical;
as well cut the flower off from its roots, and then expect to gather
the fruit. This is why sex-denial and sex-excesses so often go
together. Hence the undeniable unchastity of the mediaeval cloisters.
Nor need the manifestations of sex be physical. Erotic imagination and
voluptuous revelations are expressions of sex-passion. The monstrous
sexual visions of the saints reflect in a typical manner the
incredible violence of the sexual perception of ascetics.

We observe it, then, as a fact of wide experience that the ascetic
life is rooted really in the functional impulses; and further, that it
is only through sexual perception that the spiritual and imaginative
can be grasped and rea