ar
and ambrosia.... I have felt that eating became a sacrament, a method of
communion, an ecstatic exercise, and a sitting at the communion table of
the world."

The sacraments of Nature are in this way everywhere woven into the texture
of men's and women's bodies. Lips good to kiss with are indeed first of
all chiefly good to eat and drink with. So accumulated and overlapped have
the centres of force become in the long course of development, that the
mucous membranes of the natural orifices, through the sensitiveness gained
in their own offices, all become agents to thrill the soul in the contact
of love; it is idle to discriminate high or low, pure or impure; all alike
are sanctified already by the extreme unction of Nature. The nose receives
the breath of life; the vagina receives the water of life. Ultimately the
worth and loveliness of life must be measured by the worth and loveliness
for us of the instruments of life. The swelling breasts are such divinely
gracious insignia of womanhood because of the potential child that hangs
at them and sucks; the large curves of the hips are so voluptuous because
of the potential child they clasp within them; there can be no division
here, we cannot cut the roots from the tree. The supreme function of
manhood--the handing on of the lamp of life to future races--is carried
on, it is true, by the same instrument that is the daily conduit of the
bladder. It has been said in scorn that we are born between urine and
excrement; it may be said, in reverence, that the passage through this
channel of birth is a sacrament of Nature's more sacred and significant
than men could ever invent.

These relationships have been sometimes perceived and their meaning
realized by a sort of mystical intuition. We catch glimpses of such an
insight now and again, first among the poets and later among the
physicians of the Renaissance. In 1664 Rolfincius, in his _Ordo et Methods
Generationi Partium etc._, at the outset of the second Part devoted to the
sexual organs of women, sets forth what ancient writers have said of the
Eleusinian and other mysteries and the devotion and purity demanded of
those who approached these sacred rites. It is so also with us, he
continues, in the rites of scientific investigation. "We also operate with
sacred things. The organs of sex are to be held among sacred things. They
who approach these altars must come with devout minds. Let the profane
stand without, and the doo