lost
its hold upon women. This is true. A new age must expect to see a new
departure. As women take active participation in the work of the world
their sense of dependence and need for protection will diminish, and
we may look for a corresponding decrease in that display of excessive
religious emotion that dependence has fostered. But the needs of woman
can never be satisfied alone with work. The natural desires remain
imperative; deny these, and there will be left only the barren tree
robbed of its fruits. Sexuality first breathes into woman's spiritual
being warm and blooming life.

The religious ascetic is not common among us to-day. Yet the old
seeking for something is there. The impulse towards asceticism has, I
think, rather changed its form than passed from women. The place of
the female saint is being taken by the social ascetic. Desire is not
now set to gain salvation, but is turned towards a heightened
intellectual individuation, showing itself in nervous mental
activity. No one can have failed to note the immense egoism of the
modern woman. Women are still in fear of life and love. They have been
made ascetics through the long exercise of restraint upon their
explosively emotional temperament. They have restrained their natures
to remain _pure_. This false ideal of chastity was in the first place
forced upon them, but by long habit it has been accentuated and has
been backed up by woman's own blindness and fear. Thus to-day, in
their new-found freedom, women are seeking to bind men up in the same
bonds of denial which have restrained them. In the past they have
over-readily imbibed the doctrine of a different standard of purity
for the sexes, now they are in revolt--indeed, they are only just
emerging from a period of bitterness in relation to this matter. Men
made women into puritans, and women are arising in the strength of
their faith to enforce puritanism on men. Is this malice or is it
revenge? In any case it is foolishness. Bound up as the sexual impulse
is with the entire psychic emotional being, there would be left behind
without it only the wilderness of a cold abstraction. The Christian
belief in souls and bodies separate, and souls imprisoned in vile
clay, has wrought terrible havoc to women. I believe the two--soul and
body--are one and indivisible. Women have yet this lesson to learn:
the capacity for sense-experience is the sap of life. The power to
feel passion is in direct ratio to the stren