This cerebral initiation commonly occurs to the youth through the medium of literature.  The influence of literature in sexual education thus extends, in an incalculable degree, beyond the narrow sphere of manuals on sexual hygiene, however admirable and desirable these may be.  The greater part of literature is more or less distinctly penetrated by erotic and auto-erotic conceptions and impulses; nearly all imaginative literature proceeds from the root of sex to flower in visions of beauty and ecstasy.  The Divine Comedy of Dante is herein the immortal type of the poet’s evolution.  The youth becomes acquainted with the imaginative representations of love before he becomes acquainted with the reality of love, so that, as Leo Berg puts it, “the way to love among civilized peoples passes through imagination.”  All literature is thus, to the adolescent soul, a part of sexual education.[39] It depends, to some extent, though fortunately not entirely, on the judgment of those in authority over the young soul whether the literature to which the youth or girl is admitted is or is not of the large and humanizing order.

All great literature touches nakedly and sanely on the central facts of sex.  It is always consoling to remember this in an age of petty pruderies.  And it is a satisfaction to know that it would not be possible to emasculate the literature of the great ages, however desirable it might seem to the men of more degenerate ages, or to close the avenues to that literature against the young.  All our religious and literary traditions serve to fortify the position of the Bible and of Shakespeare.  “So many men and women,” writes a correspondent, a literary man, “gain sexual ideas in childhood from reading the Old Testament, that the Bible may be called an erotic text-book.  Most persons of either sex with whom I have conversed on the subject, say that the Books of Moses, and the stories of Amnon and Tamar, Lot and his daughters, Potiphar’s wife and Joseph, etc., caused speculation and curiosity, and gave them information of the sexual relationship.  A boy and girl of fifteen, both friends of the writer, and now over thirty years of age, used to find out erotic passages in the Bible on Sunday mornings, while in a Dissenting chapel, and pass their Bibles to one another, with their fingers on the portions that interested them.”  In the same way many a young woman has borrowed Shakespeare in order to read the glowing erotic poetry of Venus and Adonis, which her friends have told her about.

The Bible, it may be remarked, is not in every respect, a model introduction for the young mind to the questions of sex.  But even its frank acceptance, as of divine origin, of sexual rules so unlike those that are nominally our own, such as polygamy and concubinage, helps to enlarge the vision of the youthful mind by showing that the rules surrounding the child are not those everywhere and always valid, while the nakedness and realism of