re was obscenity in the fact of
Christ's birth through the sexual organs of a woman, Rufinus replies that
God created the sexual organs, and that "it is not Nature but merely human
opinion which teaches that these parts are obscene. For the rest, all the
parts of the body are made from the same clay, whatever differences there
may be in their uses and functions."[57] He looks at the matter, we see,
piously indeed, but naturally and simply, like Clement, and not, like
Augustine, through the distorting medium of a theological system.
Athanasius, in the Eastern Church, spoke in the same sense as Rufinus in
the Western Church. A certain monk named Amun had been much grieved by the
occurrence of seminal emissions during sleep, and he wrote to Athanasius
to inquire if such emissions are a sin. In the letter he wrote in reply,
Athanasius seeks to reassure Amun. "All things," he tells him, "are pure
to the pure. For what, I ask, dear and pious friend, can there be sinful
or naturally impure in excrement? Man is the handwork of God. There is
certainly nothing in us that is impure."[58] We feel as we read these
utterances that the seeds of prudery and pruriency are already alive in
the popular mind, but yet we see also that some of the most distinguished
thinkers of the early Christian Church, in striking contrast to the more
morbid and narrow-minded mediaeval ascetics, clearly stood aside from the
popular movement. On the whole, they were submerged because Christianity,
like Buddhism, had in it from the first a germ that lent itself to ascetic
renunciation, and the sexual life is always the first impulse to be
sacrificed to the passion for renunciation. But there were other germs
also in Christianity, and Luther, who in his own plebeian way asserted the
rights of the body, although he broke with mediaeval asceticism, by no
means thereby cast himself off from the traditions of the early Christian
Church.

I have thought it worth while to bring forward this evidence, although I
am perfectly well aware that the facts of Nature gain no additional
support from the authority of the Fathers or even of the Bible. Nature and
humanity existed before the Bible and would continue to exist although the
Bible should be forgotten. But the attitude of Christianity on this point
has so often been unreservedly condemned that it seems as well to point
out that at its finest moments, when it was a young and growing power in
the world, the utterances