In the last two or three hundred years there has been a very
considerable disentanglement of the idea of God from the complex of
sexual thought and feeling. But in the early days of religion the two
things were inseparably bound together; the fury of the Hebrew prophets,
for example, is continually proclaiming the extraordinary “wrath” of
their God at this or that little dirtiness or irregularity or breach of
the sexual tabus. The ceremony of circumcision is clearly indicative
of the original nature of the Semitic deity who developed into the
Trinitarian God. So far as Christianity dropped this rite, so far
Christianity disavowed the old associations. But to this day the
representative Christian churches still make marriage into a mystical
sacrament, and, with some exceptions, the Roman communion exacts
the sacrifice of celibacy from its priesthood, regardless of the
mischievousness and maliciousness that so often ensue. Nearly every
Christian church inflicts as much discredit and injustice as it can
contrive upon the illegitimate child. They do not treat illegitimate
children as unfortunate children, but as children with a mystical and
an incurable taint of SIN. Kindly easy-going Christians may resent this
statement because it does not tally with their own attitudes, but let
them consult their orthodox authorities.
One must distinguish clearly here between what is held to be sacred or
sinful in itself and what is held to be one’s duty or a nation’s duty
because it is in itself the wisest, cleanest, clearest, best thing to
do. By the latter tests and reasonable arguments most or all of our
institutions regulating the relations of the sexes may be justifiable.
But my case is not whether they can be justified by these tests but
that it is not by these tests that they are judged even to-day, by the
professors of the chief religions of the world. It is the temper and not
the conclusions of the religious bodies that I would criticise. These
sexual questions are guarded by a holy irascibility, and the most
violent efforts are made--with a sense of complete righteousness--to
prohibit their discussion. That fury about sexual things is only to be
explained on the hypothesis that the Christian God remains a sex God in
the minds of great numbers of his exponents. His disentanglement from
that plexus is incomplete. Sexual things are still to the orthodox
Christian, sacred things.
Now the God whom those of the new faith are finding is only mediately
concerned with the relations of men and women. He is no more sexual
essentially than he is essentially dietetic or hygienic. The God of
Leviticus was all these things. He is represented as prescribing the
most petty and intimate of observances--many of which are now habitually
disregarded by the Christians who profess him. . . . It is part of the
evolution of the idea of God that we have now so largely disentangled
our conception of him from the dietary and regimen and meticulous sexual
rules that were once inseparably bound up with his majesty. Christ
himself was one of the chief forces in this disentanglement, there is
the clearest evidence in several instances of his disregard of the
rule and his insistence that his disciples should seek for the spirit
underlying and often masked by the rule. His Church, being made of baser
matter, has followed him as reluctantly as possible and no further
than it was obliged. But it has followed him far enough to admit his
principle that in all these matters there is no need for superstitious
fear, that the interpretation of the divine purpose is left to the
unembarrassed intelligence of men. The church has followed him far
enough to make the harsh threatenings of priests and ecclesiastics
against what they are pleased to consider impurity or sexual impiety,
a profound inconsistency. One seems to hear their distant protests when
one reads of Christ and the Magdalen, or of Christ eating with publicans
and sinners. The clergy of our own days play the part of the
New Testament Pharisees with the utmost exactness and complete
unconsciousness. One cannot imagine a modern ecclesiastic conversing
with a Magdalen in terms of ordinary civility, unless she was in a very
high social position indeed, or blending with disreputable characters
without a dramatic sense of condescension and much explanatory by-play.
Those who profess modern religion do but follow in these matters a
course entirely compatible with what has survived of the authentic
teachings of Christ, when they declare that God is not sexual, and that
religious passion and insult and persecution upon the score of sexual
things are a barbaric inheritance.
But lest anyone should fling off here with some hasty assumption that
those who profess the religion of the true God are sexually anarchistic,
let stress be laid at once upon the opening sentence of the preceding
paragraph, and let me a little anticipate a section which follows.
We would free men and women from exact and superstitious rules and
observances, not to make them less the instruments of God but more
wholly his. The claim of modern religion is that one should give oneself
unreservedly to God, that there is no other salvation. The believer owes
all his being and every moment of his life to God, to keep mind and body
as clean, fine, wholesome, active and completely at God’s service as
he can. There is no scope for indulgence or dissipation in such
a consecrated life. It is a matter between the individual and his
conscience or his doctor or his social understanding what exactly he may
do or not do, what he may eat or drink or so forth, upon any occasion.
Nothing can exonerate him from doing his utmost to determine and perform
the right act. Nothing can excuse his failure to do so. But what is here
being insisted upon is that none of these things has immediately to do
with God or religious emotion, except only the general will to do right
in God’s service. The detailed interpretation of that “right” is for the
dispassionate consideration of the human intelligence.
All this is set down here as distinctly as possible. Because of
the emotional reservoirs of sex, sexual dogmas are among the most
obstinately recurrent of all heresies, and sexual excitement is always
tending to leak back into religious feeling. Amongst the sex-tormented
priesthood of the Roman communion in particular, ignorant of the
extreme practices of the Essenes and of the Orphic cult and suchlike
predecessors of Christianity, there seems to be an extraordinary belief
that chastity was not invented until Christianity came, and that the
religious life is largely the propitiation of God by feats of sexual
abstinence. But a superstitious abstinence that scars and embitters
the mind, distorts the imagination, makes the body gross and keeps it
unclean, is just as offensive to God as any positive depravity.