for the Study of Sex-psychology."

Why (again we ask) did Christianity make this apparently great mistake?
And again we must reply: Perhaps the mistake was not so great as
it appears to be. Perhaps this was another case of the necessity of
learning by loss. Love had to be denied, in the form of sex, in order
that it might thus the better learn its own true values and needs. Sex
had to be rejected, or defiled with the sense of guilt and self-seeking,
in order that having cast out its defilement it might return one day,
transformed in the embrace of love. The whole process has had a deep and
strange world-significance. It has led to an immensely long period of
suppression--suppression of two great instincts--the physical instinct
of sex and the emotional instinct of love. Two things which should
naturally be conjoined have been separated; and both have suffered.
And we know from the Freudian teachings what suppressions in the
root-instincts necessarily mean. We know that they inevitably terminate
in diseases and distortions of proper action, either in the body or
in the mind, or in both; and that these evils can only be cured by the
liberation of the said instincts again to their proper expression and
harmonious functioning in the whole organism. No wonder then that, with
this agelong suppression (necessary in a sense though it may have
been) which marks the Christian dispensation, there should have
been associated endless Sickness and Crime and sordid Poverty, the
Crucifixion of animals in the name of Science and of human workers in
the name of Wealth, and wars and horrors innumerable! Hercules writhing
in the Nessus-shirt or Prometheus nailed to the rocks are only as
figures of a toy miniature compared with this vision of the great and
divine Spirit of Man caught in the clutches of those dread Diseases
which through the centuries have been eating into his very heart and
vitals.

It would not be fair to pile on the Christian Church the blame for all
this. It had, no doubt, its part to play in the whole great scheme,
namely, to accentuate the self-motive; and it played the part very
thoroughly and successfully. For it must be remembered (what I have
again and again insisted on) that in the pagan cults it was always
the salvation of the CLAN, the TRIBE, the people that was the main
consideration; the advantage of the individual took only a very
secondary part. But in Christendom--after the communal enthusiasms
of apos