did
nothing of the kind. The whole human race set up an ideal of virginity;
the Greeks in Athene, the Romans in the Vestal fire, set up an ideal of
virginity. What then is your real quarrel with Catholicism? Your
quarrel can only be, your quarrel really only is, that Catholicism has
_achieved_ an ideal of virginity; that it is no longer a mere piece
of floating poetry. But if you, and a few feverish men, in top hats,
running about in a street in London, choose to differ as to the ideal
itself, not only from the Church, but from the Parthenon whose name
means virginity, from the Roman Empire which went outwards from the
virgin flame, from the whole legend and tradition of Europe, from the
lion who will not touch virgins, from the unicorn who respects them, and
who make up together the bearers of your own national shield, from the
most living and lawless of your own poets, from Massinger, who wrote the
_Virgin Martyr_, from Shakespeare, who wrote _Measure for Measure_--if
you in Fleet Street differ from all this human experience, does it never
strike you that it may be Fleet Street that is wrong?"

"No," answered Turnbull; "I trust that I am sufficiently fair-minded to
canvass and consider the idea; but having considered it, I think Fleet
Street is right, yes--even if the Parthenon is wrong. I think that as
the world goes on new psychological atmospheres are generated, and in
these atmospheres it is possible to find delicacies and combinations
which in other times would have to be represented by some ruder symbol.
Every man feels the need of some element of purity in sex; perhaps
they can only typify purity as the absence of sex. You will laugh if I
suggest that we may have made in Fleet Street an atmosphere in which
a man can be so passionate as Sir Lancelot and as pure as Sir
Galahad. But, after all, we have in the modern world erected many such
atmospheres. We have, for instance, a new and imaginative appreciation
of children."

"Quite so," replied MacIan with a singular smile. "It has been very well
put by one of the brightest of your young authors, who said: 'Unless
you become as little children ye shall in no wise enter the kingdom of
heaven.' But you are quite right; there is a modern worship of children.
And what, I ask you, is this modern worship of children? What, in the
name of all the angels and devils, is it except a worship of virginity?
Why should anyone worship a thing merely because it is small or
immat