t the Christian doctrines and ceremonials.
Somehow under the sex-taboo they became spiritualized and etherealized
out of all human use. Study the initiation-rites of any savage
tribe--with their strict discipline of the young braves in fortitude,
and the overcoming of pain and fear; with their very detailed lessons in
the arts of war and life and the duties of the grown man to his tribe;
and with their quite practical instruction in matters of Sex; and then
read our little Baptismal and Confirmation services, which ought to
correspond thereto. How thin and attenuated and weak the latter
appear! Or compare the Holy Communion, as celebrated in the sentimental
atmosphere of a Protestant Church, with an ancient Eucharistic feast of
real jollity and community of life under the acknowledged presence
of the god; or the Roman Catholic service of the Mass, including its
genuflexions and mock oblations and droning ritual sing-song, with the
actual sacrifice in early days of an animal-god-victim on a blazing
altar; and I think my meaning will be clear. We do not want, of course,
to return to all the crudities and barbarities of the past; but also we
do not want to become attenuated and spiritualized out of all mundane
sense and recognition, and to live in an otherworld Paradise void of
application to earthly affairs.

The sex-taboo in Christianity was apparently, as I have said, an effort
of the human soul to wrest itself free from the entanglement of physical
lust--which lust, though normal and appropriate and in a way gracious
among the animals, had through the domination of self-consciousness
become diseased and morbid or monstrous in Man. The work thus done has
probably been of the greatest value to the human race; but, just as in
other cases it has sometimes happened that the effort to do a certain
work has resulted in the end in an unbalanced exaggeration so here. We
are beginning to see now the harmful side of the repression of sex, and
are tentatively finding our way back again to a more pagan attitude.
And as this return-movement is taking place at a time when, from many
obvious signs, the self-conscious, grasping, commercial conception of
life is preparing to go on the wane, and the sense of solidarity to
re-establish itself, there is really good hope that our return-journey
may prove in some degree successful.

Man progresses generally, not both legs at once like a sparrow, but
by putting one leg forward first, and the