nd diffusion of its love nature. It is well known that if
either of a pair of turtle-doves dies, the mate will grieve itself to
death. "Like a pair of turtle-doves" is said of a couple who are
happily married, and the domestic life of the dove has made the dove a
symbol of peace.

Doves have been held sacred in many parts of the world, and figure
prominently in religious symbolic architecture and utensils, from
ancient times down to the present day. The symbol of the doves flying
over the ark of the covenant typifies the spiritual origin of birth,
the ark being the primordial egg, from which issued all the forms of
life. Let us also remember that they issued _in pairs_.

CHAPTER VI

CONTINENCE; CHASTITY AND ASCETICISM; THEIR SPIRITUAL SIGNIFICANCE

From the earliest forms of sex-worship, in which the creative function
was doubtless given its rightful place, down through successive stages
of sex-degeneracy, we come to the sex-perversions and the almost
general licentiousness of Ancient Greece and Rome, with whom the sex
function became nothing more exalted than a method of procreation, in
common with the animals; and a means of sense-gratification, on a par
with gluttony.

Even among the intellectual Greeks, the highest type of a civilization
that, although epicurean and esthetic, was yet essentially
materialistic, sexual intercourse had no more spiritual place than it
occupies today in fine stock-breeding.

Between ancient Roman licentiousness and our own modern attitude
toward the sex-relation, there intervenes that terrible time in the
history of Human Evolution, known as the Dark Ages, in which was
evolved the unnatural view of the function of sex, exemplified rather
erotically, in many instances, by asceticism and celibacy. Although it
sounds paradoxical, yet there is a celibacy that is distinctly erotic.

In reading of some of the experiences in the lives of the saints, the
normal, healthy person feels an aversion similar to that which he
experiences in viewing the effects of physical disease; and yet we
must note in this abnormal attitude of the Church toward the
sex-relation, the effect of nature's attempt at equilibrium; a
revulsion from the effect of the centuries preceding.

Some of the contributing causes of this revulsion were: celibacy,
except within the Church, forbidden by the Roman Senate; the fact that
women had no choice in marriage; the devastating wars