There can be no doubt that the undue discredit into which the idea of chastity began to fall from the eighteenth century onwards was largely due to the existence of that merely external and conventional physical chastity which was arbitrarily enforced so far as it could be enforced,—­and is indeed in some degree still enforced, nominally or really,—­upon all respectable women outside marriage.  The conception of the physical virtue of virginity had degraded the conception of the spiritual virtue of chastity.  A mere routine, it was felt, prescribed to a whole sex, whether they would or not, could never possess the beauty and charm of a virtue.  At the same time it began to be realized that, as a matter of fact, the state of compulsory virginity is not only not a state especially favorable to the cultivation of real virtues, but that it is bound up with qualities which are no longer regarded as of high value.[79]

“How arbitrary, artificial, contrary to Nature, is the life now imposed upon women in this matter of chastity!” wrote James Hinton forty years ago.  “Think of that line:  ’A woman who deliberates is lost.’  We make danger, making all womanhood hang upon a point like this, and surrounding it with unnatural and preternatural dangers.  There is a wanton unreason embodied in the life of woman now; the present ‘virtue’ is a morbid unhealthy plant.  Nature and God never poised the life of a woman upon such a needle’s point.  The whole modern idea of chastity has in it sensual exaggeration, surely, in part, remaining to us from other times, with what was good in it in great part gone.”

    “The whole grace of virginity,” wrote another philosopher,
    Guyau, “is ignorance.  Virginity, like certain fruits, can only
    be preserved by a process of desiccation.”

Merimee pointed out the same desiccating influence of virginity.  In a letter dated 1859 he wrote:  “I think that nowadays people attach far too much importance to chastity.  Not that I deny that chastity is a virtue, but there are degrees in virtues just as there are in vices.  It seems to be absurd that a woman should be banished from society for having had a lover, while a woman who is miserly, double-faced and spiteful goes everywhere.  The morality of this age is assuredly not that which is taught in the Gospel.  In my opinion it is better to love too much than not enough.  Nowadays dry hearts are stuck up on a pinnacle” (Revue des Deux Mondes, April, 1896).

Dr. H. Paul has developed an allied point.  She writes:  “There are girls who, even as children, have prostituted themselves by masturbation and lascivious thoughts.  The purity of their souls has long been lost and nothing remains unknown to them, but—­they have preserved their hymens!  That is for the sake of the future husband.  Let no one dare to doubt their innocence with that unimpeachable evidence!  And if another girl, who has passed