were
equally present--Christ Who is in truth the ideal of all humanity without
distinction of race, class or sex.

This is true. But its truth has been misunderstood by teachers like Edward
Carpenter. Beauty and strength in human nature as elsewhere depend on
harmony, and in such characters as I have cited that harmony is found. For,
in fact, there is no instance in nature of a male wholly male or a female
entirely female. Even physically the elements are shared. And if we say
with confidence that where these elements are most fully shared there is
found the fullest humanity, we are not committed to adding that where
the body has one predominating character and the spirit another there is
something finer still!

For harmony of life and temperament the body should be the perfect
instrument and expression of the spirit. When you have the temperament
of one sex in the body of another, this cannot be. There is at once a
disharmony, a dislocation, a disorder--in fact, a less perfect not a more
perfect type. Humanity does, I believe, progress towards a fuller element
of the woman in the man, the man in the woman, and the best we have
produced so far confirm the truth of this. But it is not an advance to
produce a type in which the temperament and the body are at odds. This is
not progress but perversion.

It is the same consciousness of dislocation which makes us condemn
homosexual practices. Here it is a dislocation between the means and
the end. The instinct of sex, to whatever use it may have been put, is
fundamentally the creative instinct. It is not by an accident, it is not as
a side-issue, that it is through sexual attraction that children are born.
And however sublimated, however enriched, restrained and conditioned, the
creative power of physical passion remains at once its justification and
its consecration. To use it in a relationship which must for ever be barren
is "unnatural" and in the deepest sense immoral. It is not easy to define
"immorality," because morality is one of the fundamentals which defy
definition; but though it is not easy to define, it is not hard to
recognize. All the world knows that it is immoral to prostitute the
creative power of genius to mere commercialism, for money or for fame. No
one can draw a hard and fast line. No one will quarrel with a great artist
because he lives by his art, or because he will sometimes turn aside to
amuse himself, his public, or his friends. Michaelangelo is