One must distinguish clearly here between what is held to be sacred or sinful in itself and what is held to be one’s duty or a nation’s duty because it is in itself the wisest, cleanest, clearest, best thing to do.  By the latter tests and reasonable arguments most or all of our institutions regulating the relations of the sexes may be justifiable.  But my case is not whether they can be justified by these tests but that it is not by these tests that they are judged even to-day, by the professors of the chief religions of the world.  It is the temper and not the conclusions of the religious bodies that I would criticise.  These sexual questions are guarded by a holy irascibility, and the most violent efforts are made—­with a sense of complete righteousness—­to prohibit their discussion.  That fury about sexual things is only to be explained on the hypothesis that the Christian God remains a sex God in the minds of great numbers of his exponents.  His disentanglement from that plexus is incomplete.  Sexual things are still to the orthodox Christian, sacred things.

Now the God whom those of the new faith are finding is only mediately concerned with the relations of men and women.  He is no more sexual essentially than he is essentially dietetic or hygienic.  The God of Leviticus was all these things.  He is represented as prescribing the most petty and intimate of observances—­many of which are now habitually disregarded by the Christians who profess him. . . .  It is part of the evolution of the idea of God that we have now so largely disentangled our conception of him from the dietary and regimen and meticulous sexual rules that were once inseparably bound up with his majesty.  Christ himself was one of the chief forces in this disentanglement, there is the clearest evidence in several instances of his disregard of the rule and his insistence that his disciples should seek for the spirit underlying and often masked by the rule.  His Church, being made of baser matter, has followed him as reluctantly as possible and no further than it was obliged.  But it has followed him far enough to admit his principle that in all these matters there is no need for superstitious fear, that the interpretation of the divine purpose is left to the unembarrassed intelligence of men.  The church has followed him far enough to make the harsh threatenings of priests and ecclesiastics against what they are pleased to consider impurity or sexual impiety, a profound inconsistency.  One seems to hear their distant protests when one reads of Christ and the Magdalen, or of Christ eating with publicans and sinners.  The clergy of our own days play the part of the New Testament Pharisees with the utmost exactness and complete unconsciousness.  One cannot imagine a modern ecclesiastic conversing with a Magdalen in terms of ordinary civility, unless she was in a very high social position indeed, or blending with disreputable characters without a dramatic sense of condescension and much explanatory by-play.  Those who profess modern religion do but follow in these matters a course entirely compatible with what has survived of the authentic teachings of Christ, when they declare that God is not sexual, and that religious passion and insult and persecution upon the score of sexual things are a barbaric inheritance.