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.