he sexual life is no longer lived, as it were,
openly. Symbolism and mysticism develop; a more complex social life
provides disguised outlets for primitive and indestructible feelings.
Sexualism, instead of being something to be glorified, and, so to speak,
annotated by religious ceremonies, becomes something to be hidden or
decried. Ignored it may be. Decried it may be; but it will not be
denied. That is a practical impossibility in the case of so powerful and
so pervasive a fact as sex. We may disguise its expression, but only too
often the disguise is the equivalent of undesirable and unhealthy
manifestations.

The modern history of religion offers a melancholy illustration of the
truth of the last sentence, and it is quite clearly exhibited in the
history of Christianity itself. From the beginning it strove to suppress
the power of sexual feeling. It was an enemy against whom one had to be
always on guard, one that had to be crushed, or at least kept in
subjection in the interests of spiritual development. And yet the very
intensity of the efforts at suppression defeated the object aimed at.
With some of the leaders of early Christianity sex became an obsession.
Long dwelling upon its power made them unduly and unhealthily conscious
of its presence. Instead of sex taking its place as one of the facts of
life, which like most other facts might be good or bad as circumstances
determined, it was so much dwelt upon as to often dwarf everything else.
Asceticism is, after all, mainly a reversed sensualism, or at least
confesses the existence of a sensualism that must not be allowed
expression lest its manifestation becomes overpowering. Mortification
confesses the supremacy of sense as surely as gratification. Moreover,
mortification of sense as preached by the great ascetics does not
prevent that most dangerous of all forms of gratification, the
sensualism of the imagination. That remains, and is apt to gain in
strength since the fundamentally healthful energies are denied
legitimate and natural modes of expression. Thus it is that we find
developing social life not always providing a healthy outlet for the
sexual life, and thus it is that the intense striving of religious
leaders against the power of the sexual impulse has often forced it into
strange and harmful forms of expression. So we find throughout the
history of religion, not only that a deal of what has passed for
supernatural illumination to have undoubtedly h