Aselgeia.  That goddess has always been a sufficient power amongst mankind, and her worship was generally supposed to need restraining rather than encouraging.  But here is now a whole people, law, literature, nay, and art too, at her service!  Stimulations and suggestions by her and to her meet one in it at every turn....  ‘Nature,’ cries M. Renan, ‘cares nothing about chastity.’  What a slap in the face to the sticklers for ’Whatsoever things are pure’!...  Even though a gifted man like M. Renan may be so carried away by the tide of opinion in France where he lives, as to say that Nature cares nothing about chastity, and to see with amused indulgence the worship of the great goddess Lubricity, let us stand fast and say that her worship is against nature—­human nature—­and that it is ruin.  For this is the test of its being against human nature, that for human societies it is ruin.  And the test is one from which there is no escape, as from the old tests in such matters there may be.  For, if you allege that it is the will of God that we should be pure, the sceptical Gallo-Latins will tell you that they do not know any such person.  And in like manner, if it is said that those who serve the goddess Aselgeia shall not inherit the Kingdom of God, the Gallo-Latin may tell you that he does not believe in any such place.  But that the sure tendency and upshot of things establishes that the service of the goddess Aselgeia is ruin, that her followers are marred and stunted by it, and disqualified for the ideal society of the future, is an infallible test to employ.

“The saints admonish us to let our thoughts run upon whatsoever things are pure, if we would inherit the Kingdom of God; and the divine Plato tells us that we have within us a many-headed beast and a man, and that by dissoluteness we feed or strengthen the beast in us, and starve the man; and finally, following the divine Plato among the sages at a humble distance, comes the prosaic and unfashionable Paley, and says in his precise way:  that ’this vice has a tendency, which other species of vice have not so directly, to unsettle and weaken the powers of the understanding; as well as, I think, in a greater degree than other vices, to render the heart thoroughly corrupt.’  True; and, once admitted and fostered, it eats like a canker, and with difficulty can ever be brought to let go its hold again, but for ever tightens it.  Hardness and insolence come in its train; an insolence which grows till it ends by exasperating and alienating everybody; a hardness which grows until the man can at last scarcely take pleasure in anything, outside the service of his goddess, except cupidity and greed, and cannot be touched with emotion by any language except Fustian.  Such are the fruits of the worship of the great goddess Aselgeia.

“So, instead of saying that Nature cares nothing about chastity, let us say that human nature, our nature, cares about it a great deal....  The Eternal has attached to certain moral causes the safety or the ruin of States, and the present popular literature of France is a sign that she has a most dangerous moral disease.”