First among these is the habit of allowing ourselves to be bound not
only by the truths of the Christian religion but by the excesses and
extravagances which the Christian movement acquired in its earlier days
as a violent reaction against what it still calls paganism. By far the
most dangerous of these, because it is a blasphemy against life, and,
to put it in Christian terms, an accusation of indecency against God, is
the notion that sex, with all its operations, is in itself absolutely
an obscene thing, and that an immaculate conception is a miracle.
So unwholesome an absurdity could only have gained ground under two
conditions: one, a reaction against a society in which sensual luxury
had been carried to revolting extremes, and, two, a belief that the
world was coming to an end, and that therefore sex was no longer a
necessity. Christianity, because it began under these conditions,
made sexlessness and Communism the two main practical articles of its
propaganda; and it has never quite lost its original bias in these
directions. In spite of the putting off of the Second Coming from
the lifetime of the apostles to the millennium, and of the great
disappointment of the year 1000 A.D., in which multitudes of Christians
seriously prepared for the end of the world, the prophet who announces
that the end is at hand is still popular. Many of the people who
ridicule his demonstrations that the fantastic monsters of the book
of Revelation are among us in the persons of our own political
contemporaries, and who proceed sanely in all their affairs on the
assumption that the world is going to last, really do believe that there
will be a Judgment Day, and that it MIGHT even be in their own time.
A thunderstorm, an eclipse, or any very unusual weather will make them
apprehensive and uncomfortable.
This explains why, for a long time, the Christian Church refused to have
anything to do with marriage. The result was, not the abolition of sex,
but its excommunication. And, of course, the consequences of persuading
people that matrimony was an unholy state were so grossly carnal, that
the Church had to execute a complete right-about-face, and try to make
people understand that it was a holy state: so holy indeed that it could
not be validly inaugurated without the blessing of the Church. And by
this teaching it did something to atone for its earlier blasphemy. But
the mischief of chopping and changing your doctrine to meet this or that
practical emergency instead of keeping it adjusted to the whole scheme
of life, is that you end by having half-a-dozen contradictory doctrines
to suit half-a-dozen different emergencies. The Church solemnized and
sanctified marriage without ever giving up its original Pauline doctrine
on the subject. And it soon fell into another confusion. At the point at
which it took up marriage and endeavored to make it holy, marriage was,
as it still is, largely a survival of the custom of selling women to
men. Now in all trades a marked difference is made in price between
a new article and a second-hand one. The moment we meet with this
difference in value between human beings, we may know that we are in the
slave-market, where the conception of our relations to the persons sold
is neither religious nor natural nor human nor superhuman, but simply
commercial. The Church, when it finally gave its blessing to marriage,
did not, in its innocence, fathom these commercial traditions.
Consequently it tried to sanctify them too, with grotesque results. The
slave-dealer having always asked more money for virginity, the Church,
instead of detecting the money-changer and driving him out of the
temple, took him for a sentimental and chivalrous lover, and, helped by
its only half-discarded doctrine of celibacy, gave virginity a heavenly
value to ennoble its commercial pretensions. In short, Mammon, always
mighty, put the Church in his pocket, where he keeps it to this day,
in spite of the occasional saints and martyrs who contrive from time to
time to get their heads and souls free to testify against him.