And then he goes on to what he justly calls “the other great Christian virtue, Pureness.”  When he was thirty-two, he had written—­“The lives and deaths of the ‘pure in heart’ have, perhaps, the privilege of touching us more deeply than those of others—­partly, no doubt, because with them the disproportion of suffering to deserts seems so unusually great.  However, with them one feels—­even I feel—­that for their purity’s sake, if for that alone, whatever delusions they may have wandered in, and whatever impossibilities they may have dreamed of, they shall undoubtedly, in some sense or other, see God.”  And now, twenty-three years later, he returns to the same theme.  Science, he says, is beginning to throw doubts on the “truth and validity of the Christian idea of Pureness.”  There can be no more vital question for human society.  On the side of natural truth, experience must decide.  “But,” he says, “finely-touched souls have a presentiment of a thing’s natural truth, even though it be questioned, and long before the palpable proof by experience convinces all the world.  They have it quite independently of their attitude towards traditional religion....  All well-inspired souls will perceive the profound natural truth of the idea of pureness, and will be sure, therefore, that the more boldly it is challenged the more sharply and signally will experience mark its truth.  So that of the two great Christian virtues, charity and chastity, kindness and pureness, the one has at this moment the most signal testimony from experience to its intrinsic truth and weight, and the other is expecting it.”

Again, in God and the Bible, he has a most instructive passage on the relation of the sexes.  “Here,” he says, “we are on ground where to walk right is of vital concern to men, and where disasters are plentiful.”  He speculates on that relation as it may be supposed to have subsisted in the first ages of the human race, and tries to trace it down to the point of time “where history and religion begin.”  “And at this point we first find the Hebrew people, with polygamy still clinging to it as a survival from the times of ignorance, but with the marriage-tie solidly established, strict and sacred, as we see it between Abraham and Sara.  Presently this same Hebrew people, with that aptitude which characterized it for being profoundly impressed by ideas of moral order, placed in the Decalogue the marriage-tie under the express and solemn sanction of the Eternal, by the Seventh Commandment:  Thou shalt not commit adultery.”  And again:  “Such was Israel’s genius for the ideas of moral order and of right, such his intuition of the Eternal that makes for righteousness, that he felt without a shadow of a doubt, and said with the most impressive solemnity, that Free Love was—­to speak, again, like our modern philosopher—­fatal to progress. He knoweth not that the dead are there, and that her guests are in the depths of hell.”