ght into
fashion by the Renaissance. "As long as Danae was free," remarks
Ferrand in his sixteenth century treatise, _De la Maladie
d'Amour_, "she was chaste." And Sir Kenelm Digby, the latest
representative of the Renaissance spirit, insists in his _Private
Memoirs_ that the liberty which Lycurgus, "the wisest human
law-maker that ever was," gave to women to communicate their
bodies to men to whom they were drawn by noble affection, and the
hope of generous offspring, was the true cause why "real chastity
flourished in Sparta more than in any other part of the world."

In Protestant countries the ascetic ideal of chastity was still further
discredited by the Reformation movement which was in considerable part a
revolt against compulsory celibacy. Religion was thus no longer placed on
the side of chastity. In the eighteenth century, if not earlier, the
authority of Nature also was commonly invoked against chastity. It has
thus happened that during the past two centuries serious opinion
concerning chastity has only been partially favorable to it. It began to
be felt that an unhappy and injurious mistake had been perpetrated by
attempting to maintain a lofty ideal which encouraged hypocrisy. "The
human race would gain much," as Senancour wrote early in the nineteenth
century in his remarkable book on love, "if virtue were made less
laborious. The merit would not be so great, but what is the use of an
elevation which can rarely be sustained?"[78]

There can be no doubt that the undue discredit into which the idea of
chastity began to fall from the eighteenth century onwards was largely
due to the existence of that merely external and conventional physical
chastity which was arbitrarily enforced so far as it could be
enforced,--and is indeed in some degree still enforced, nominally or
really,--upon all respectable women outside marriage. The conception of
the physical virtue of virginity had degraded the conception of the
spiritual virtue of chastity. A mere routine, it was felt, prescribed to a
whole sex, whether they would or not, could never possess the beauty and
charm of a virtue. At the same time it began to be realized that, as a
matter of fact, the state of compulsory virginity is not only not a state
especially favorable to the cultivation of real virtues, but that it is
bound up with qualities which are no longer regarded as of high value.[79]

"How arbitrary, artificial,