Soul and body, according to Tertullian, are in the closest association.  The soul is the life-principle of the body, but there is no activity of the soul which is not manifested and conditioned by the flesh."[56] More weight attaches to Rufinus Tyrannius, the friend and fellow-student of St. Jerome, in the fourth century, who wrote a commentary on the Apostles’ Creed, which was greatly esteemed by the early and mediaeval Church, and is indeed still valued even to-day.  Here, in answer to those who declared that there was obscenity in the fact of Christ’s birth through the sexual organs of a woman, Rufinus replies that God created the sexual organs, and that “it is not Nature but merely human opinion which teaches that these parts are obscene.  For the rest, all the parts of the body are made from the same clay, whatever differences there may be in their uses and functions."[57] He looks at the matter, we see, piously indeed, but naturally and simply, like Clement, and not, like Augustine, through the distorting medium of a theological system.  Athanasius, in the Eastern Church, spoke in the same sense as Rufinus in the Western Church.  A certain monk named Amun had been much grieved by the occurrence of seminal emissions during sleep, and he wrote to Athanasius to inquire if such emissions are a sin.  In the letter he wrote in reply, Athanasius seeks to reassure Amun.  “All things,” he tells him, “are pure to the pure.  For what, I ask, dear and pious friend, can there be sinful or naturally impure in excrement?  Man is the handwork of God.  There is certainly nothing in us that is impure."[58] We feel as we read these utterances that the seeds of prudery and pruriency are already alive in the popular mind, but yet we see also that some of the most distinguished thinkers of the early Christian Church, in striking contrast to the more morbid and narrow-minded mediaeval ascetics, clearly stood aside from the popular movement.  On the whole, they were submerged because Christianity, like Buddhism, had in it from the first a germ that lent itself to ascetic renunciation, and the sexual life is always the first impulse to be sacrificed to the passion for renunciation.  But there were other germs also in Christianity, and Luther, who in his own plebeian way asserted the rights of the body, although he broke with mediaeval asceticism, by no means thereby cast himself off from the traditions of the early Christian Church.

I have thought it worth while to bring forward this evidence, although I am perfectly well aware that the facts of Nature gain no additional support from the authority of the Fathers or even of the Bible.  Nature and humanity existed before the Bible and would continue to exist although the Bible should be forgotten.  But the attitude of Christianity on this point has so often been unreservedly condemned that it seems as well to point out that at its finest moments, when it was a young and growing power in the world, the utterances of Christianity were often at one with those of Nature and reason.  There are many, it may be added, who find it a matter of consolation that in following the natural and rational path in this matter they are not thereby altogether breaking with the religious traditions of their race.