was the prevailing form of government.  In early historical and pre-classical times, promiscuity was systematised by religion in India and the countries round the Mediterranean and survived in the Temple Prostitution and the Mysteries.  Man as yet felt himself only as a part of nature, and aspired to no more than a life in harmony with her laws.  The worship of fertility and the endless renewal of life was the object of the orgiastic cults of Adonis and Astarte in the East, and Dionysus and Aphrodite in Greece; unbridled licentiousness and blind gratification of the senses their sacrament.

With the growth of civilisation and the development of personality there slowly crept into the minds of men a distaste for this irregular sexuality and a desire for a less chaotic state of things.  This longing and the wish for legitimate heirs gradually overcame promiscuity and, in Greece, led to the establishment of the monogamous system.  It must not be assumed, however, that the Greek ideal of marriage bore any resemblance to our modern conception.  True, the wife occupied an honoured position as the guardian of hearth and children and was treated by her husband with affection and respect, but she was not free.  Nor was her husband expected to be faithful to her.  Marriage in no way restricted his liberty, but left him free to seek intellectual stimulation in the society of the hetaerae, and gratification of the senses in the company of his slaves.  Love in our sense was unknown to the ancients, and although there is a modern note in the legends of the faithful Penelope, and the love which united Orpheus and Eurydice, yet, so Lucka tells us, these instances should be regarded rather as poetic divinations of a future stage of feeling than actual facts then within the scope of probability.  Even Plato, in whom all wisdom and ante-Christian culture culminated, was still, in this respect, a citizen of the old world, for he, too, knew as yet nothing of the spiritual love of a man for a woman.  To him the love of an individual was but a beginning, the road to the love of perfect beauty and the eternal ideas.

On the threshold of the second stage of the erotic life stands Christianity, which, in sharp contrast to antiquity and to the classical period, sought the centre and climax of life in the soul.  The founder of the “religion of love” discovered the individual, and by so doing laid the foundation for that metaphysical love which found its most striking expression in the deification of woman and the cult of the Virgin Mary.  How this change of mental attitude was brought about is worked out in a brilliant chapter, entitled “The Birth of Europe.”  The revivifying influence of Christ’s preaching and personality was stifled after the first centuries by the rigid dogma and formalism which had altered his doctrine almost past recognition.  The Church was building up its political structure and tolerated no rival.  Art, literature, music, all the enthusiasm