For Christianity the permission to yield to the sexual impulse at all was merely a concession to human weakness, an indulgence only possible when it was carefully hedged and guarded on every side.  Almost from the first the Christians began to cultivate the art of virginity, and they could not so dislocate their point of view as to approve of the art of love.  All their passionate adoration in the sphere of sex went out towards chastity.  Possessed by such ideals, they could only tolerate human love at all by giving to one special form of it a religious sacramental character, and even that sacramental halo imparted to love a quasi-ascetic character which precluded the idea of regarding love as an art.[379] Love gained a religious element but it lost a moral element, since, outside Christianity, the art of love is part of the foundation of sexual morality, wherever such morality in any degree exists.  In Christendom love in marriage was left to shift for itself as best it might; the art of love was a dubious art which was held to indicate a certain commerce with immorality and even indeed to be itself immoral.  That feeling was doubtless strengthened by the fact that Ovid was the most conspicuous master in literature of the art of love.  His literary reputation—­far greater than it now seems to us[380]—­gave distinction to his position as the author of the chief extant text-book of the art of love.  With Humanism and the Renaissance and the consequent realization that Christianity had overlooked one side of life, Ovid’s Ars Amatoria was placed on a pedestal it had not occupied before or since.  It represented a step forward in civilization; it revealed love not as a mere animal instinct or a mere pledged duty, but as a complex, humane, and refined relationship which demanded cultivation; “arte regendus amor.”  Boccaccio made a wise teacher put Ovid’s Ars Amatoria into the hands of the young.  In an age still oppressed by the mediaeval spirit, it was a much needed text-book, but it possessed the fatal defect, as a text-book, of presenting the erotic claims of the individual as divorced from the claims of good social order.  It never succeeded in establishing itself as a generally accepted manual of love, and in the eyes of many it served to stamp the subject it dealt with as one that lies outside the limits of good morals.

When, however, we take a wider survey, and inquire into the discipline for life that is imparted to the young in many parts of the world, we shall frequently find that the art of love, understood in varying ways, is an essential part of that discipline.  Summary, though generally adequate, as are the educational methods of primitive peoples, they not seldom include a training in those arts which render a woman agreeable to a man and a man agreeable to a woman in the relationship of marriage, and it is often more or less dimly realized that courtship is not a mere preliminary to marriage, but a biologically essential part of the marriage relationship throughout.