a number of men and women should seek
gratification of their sensual feelings in ways not countenanced by the
laws of normal life need not excite surprise. There always have been and
always will be such. But to do this in the name of religion, and with a
persistency as great as that of the religious idea itself, is a
phenomenon that surely deserves more attention than it ordinarily
receives. Nor can it be said with justice that these sects began in mere
conscious lust. They ended there, true; more or less disguised, it may
always have been present, but those who initiated them believed that
they were justified in doing so by religious principles, and appealed to
those principles to justify their conduct. Why should this have been the
case? Why should conduct of which men and women are ashamed in the
social sphere, and which their social sense promptly condemns, in the
religious sphere be crowned with the dignity of lofty principles and
fought for with the fervour of intense conviction? So long as
theologians leave that question unanswered, their arguments are simply
wide of the real issue.

Naturally, the closer we get to our own day, and to times when religious
feeling is more vigorously controlled by purely social forces, these
manifestations of sexuality become less frequent, less widely spread,
and more transient in character. Still they do occur. For reasons that
do not concern us here, America has in recent years been a favourable
ground for these religio-sexual developments. A sympathetic account of
many of these American sects will be found in Hepworth Dixon's
_Spiritual Wives_, with accounts of similar sects in Germany and
England. In some cases many of the features of the early Christian sects
were reproduced, even to the length of young women sharing the bedrooms
of their spiritual guides. All took Paul as their principal authority.
J. H. Noyes, one of the best known and most representative of these
teachers, laid down the main principles of his teachings thus:--

"When the will of God is done on earth as it is in heaven, there will be
no marriage. The marriage supper of the Lamb is a feast at which every
dish is free to every guest. Exclusiveness, jealousy, quarrelling, have
no place there, for the same reason as that which forbids the guests at
a thanksgiving dinner to claim each his separate dish, and quarrel with
the rest for his rights. In a holy community there is no more reason why
sexual intercourse