To some, on the other hand, the exercise of sexual intercourse in the sunlight and the open air seems so important that they are inclined to elevate it to the rank of a religious exercise.  I quote from a communication on this point received from Australia:  “This shameful thing that must not be spoken of or done (except in the dark) will some day, I believe, become the one religious ceremony of the human race, in the spring. (Oh, what springs!) People will have become very sane, well-bred, aristocratic (all of them aristocrats), and on the whole opposed to rites and superstitions, for they will have a perfect knowledge of the past.  The coition of lovers in the springtime will be the one religious ceremony they will allow themselves.  I have a vision sometimes of the holy scene, but I am afraid it is too beautiful to describe.  ’The intercourse of the sexes, I have dreamed, is ineffably beautiful, too fair to be remembered,’ wrote the chaste Thoreau.  Verily human beauty, joy, and love will reach their divinest height during those inaugural days of springtide coupling.  When the world is one Paradise, the consummation of the lovers, the youngest and most beautiful, will take place in certain sacred valleys in sight of thousands assembled to witness it.  For days it will take place in these valleys where the sun will rise on a dream of passionate voices, of clinging human forms, of flowers and waters, and the purple and gold of the sunrise are reflected on hills illumined with pansies. [I know not if the writer recalled George Chapman’s “Enamelled pansies used at nuptials still"], and repeated on golden human flesh and human hair.  In these sacred valleys the subtle perfume of the pansies will mingle with the divine fragrance of healthy naked young women and men in the spring coupling.  You and I shall not see that, but we may help to make it possible.”  This rhapsody (an unconscious repetition of Saint-Lambert’s at Mlle. Quinault’s table in the eighteenth century) serves to illustrate the revolt which tends to take place against the unnatural and artificial degradation of the sexual act.

In some parts of the world it has seemed perfectly natural and reasonable that so great and significant an act as that of coitus should be consecrated to the divinity, and hence arose the custom of prayer before sexual intercourse.  Thus Zoroaster ordained that a married couple should pray before coitus, and after the act they should say together:  “O, Sapondomad, I trust this seed to thee, preserve it for me, for it is a man.”  In the Gorong Archipelago it is customary also for husband and wife to pray together before the sexual act (Ploss and Bartels, Das Weib, Bd. i, Ch.  XVII).  The civilized man, however, has come to regard his stomach as the most important of his organs, and he utters his conventional grace, not before love,