There is not in this any question of the bestial depravity which deliberately debauches the young and innocent:  it is a question of the kind of friendship glorified by Plato.  And those who uphold the Platonic view are not always debauchees but sometimes men and women who, however incomprehensibly, still sincerely believe that they and not we who oppose them are the true idealists.  This is why it is worth while to state our reasons for our profound disagreement, and to do so as intelligently and fairly as possible.  It is also worth while because no one has suffered more cruelly or more hopelessly than those whose temperament or abnormality has been treated by most of us as though it were in itself, and without actual wrong-doing, a crime worthy of denunciation and scorn.

First, then, let it be remembered that the highest types humanity has evolved have been men and women who are really “human,” that is to say who have not only those qualities which are generally regarded as characteristic of their sex, but have had some share of the other sex’s qualities also.  A man who is (if such a thing could be) wholly and exclusively male in all his qualities would be repulsive; so would a woman wholly and exclusively female.  One has only to look at history to realize it.  Compared with the exquisite tenderness and joy of a St. Francis of Assisi, the courage and determination of a St. Joan of Arc, the intellectual power of a St. Catherine of Siena or St. Theresa of Spain, the “brute male” who is wholly male, the “eternal feminine” with her suffocating sexuality seem on the one hand inhuman, on the other subhuman.  It is not the absence of the masculine qualities in a man, or of the feminine qualities in a woman which raises them above the mass; it is the presence in power of both; and no man is truly human who has not something of the woman in him—­no woman who has not something of the man.  Here is a certain truth.  And its supreme example is Christ Himself—­Christ in Whom power and tenderness, strength and insight, courage and compassion 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!