It is scarcely necessary to remark that when we turn from Christianity to the other great world-religions, we do not usually meet with so ambiguous an attitude towards sex.  The Mahommedans were as emphatic in asserting the sanctity of sex as they were in asserting physical cleanliness; they were prepared to carry the functions of sex into the future life, and were never worried, as Luther and so many other Christians have been, concerning the lack of occupation in Heaven.  In India, although India is the home of the most extreme forms of religious asceticism, sexual love has been sanctified and divinized to a greater extent than in any other part of the world.  “It seems never to have entered into the heads of the Hindu legislators,” said Sir William Jones long since (Works, vol. ii, p. 311), “that anything natural could be offensively obscene, a singularity which pervades all their writings, but is no proof of the depravity of their morals.”  The sexual act has often had a religious significance in India, and the minutest details of the sexual life and its variations are discussed in Indian erotic treatises in a spirit of gravity, while nowhere else have the anatomical and physiological sexual characters of women been studied with such minute and adoring reverence.  “Love in India, both as regards theory and practice,” remarks Richard Schmidt (Beitraege zur Indischen Erotik, p. 2) “possesses an importance which it is impossible for us even to conceive.”

In Protestant countries the influence of the Reformation, by rehabilitating sex as natural, indirectly tended to substitute in popular feeling towards sex the opprobrium of sinfulness by the opprobrium of animality.  Henceforth the sexual impulse must be disguised or adorned to become respectably human.  This may be illustrated by a passage in Pepys’s Diary in the seventeenth century.  On the morning after the wedding day it was customary to call up new married couples by music; the absence of this music on one occasion (in 1667) seemed to Pepys “as if they had married like dog and bitch.”  We no longer insist on the music, but the same feeling still exists in the craving for other disguises and adornments for the sexual impulse.  We do not always realize that love brings its own sanctity with it.

Nowadays indeed, whenever the repugnance to the sexual side of life manifests itself, the assertion nearly always made is not so much that it is “sinful” as that it is “beastly.”  It is regarded as that part of man which most closely allies him to the lower animals.  It should scarcely be necessary to point out that this is a mistake.  On whichever side, indeed, we approach it, the implication that sex in man and animals is identical cannot be borne out.  From the point of view of those who accept this identity it would be much more correct to say that men are inferior, rather than on a level with animals, for in animals under natural conditions the