of Christianity were often at one with those of
Nature and reason. There are many, it may be added, who find it a matter
of consolation that in following the natural and rational path in this
matter they are not thereby altogether breaking with the religious
traditions of their race.

It is scarcely necessary to remark that when we turn from
Christianity to the other great world-religions, we do not
usually meet with so ambiguous an attitude towards sex. The
Mahommedans were as emphatic in asserting the sanctity of sex as
they were in asserting physical cleanliness; they were prepared
to carry the functions of sex into the future life, and were
never worried, as Luther and so many other Christians have been,
concerning the lack of occupation in Heaven. In India, although
India is the home of the most extreme forms of religious
asceticism, sexual love has been sanctified and divinized to a
greater extent than in any other part of the world. "It seems
never to have entered into the heads of the Hindu legislators,"
said Sir William Jones long since (_Works_, vol. ii, p. 311),
"that anything natural could be offensively obscene, a
singularity which pervades all their writings, but is no proof of
the depravity of their morals." The sexual act has often had a
religious significance in India, and the minutest details of the
sexual life and its variations are discussed in Indian erotic
treatises in a spirit of gravity, while nowhere else have the
anatomical and physiological sexual characters of women been
studied with such minute and adoring reverence. "Love in India,
both as regards theory and practice," remarks Richard Schmidt
(_Beitraege zur Indischen Erotik_, p. 2) "possesses an importance
which it is impossible for us even to conceive."

In Protestant countries the influence of the Reformation, by
rehabilitating sex as natural, indirectly tended to substitute in popular
feeling towards sex the opprobrium of sinfulness by the opprobrium of
animality. Henceforth the sexual impulse must be disguised or adorned to
become respectably human. This may be illustrated by a passage in Pepys's
_Diary_ in the seventeenth century. On the morning after the wedding day
it was customary to call up new married couples by music; the absence of
this music on one occasion (in 1667) seemed to Pepys "as if they had
married like dog and bitch." We