But the moment the preacher declared his purpose to consider now the
application of this great command to the individual life and character of
man and woman as simply man and woman, the entomologist became the closest
listener in the crowded throng.

The sermon was a daring one. I was struck by the shrewd concessions with
which the speaker defined personal purity and the various false
conceptions of it that pass current; abandoning the entrenched hills, so
to speak, of his church's traditional rigor and of many conventional
rules, and drawing after him into the unfortified plain his least
persuadable hearers of whatever churchly or unchurchly prejudice, to
surround them finally at one wide sweep and receive their unconditional
surrender. His periods were not as embarrassing to a mixed audience as my
citations would indicate. Those that I bring together were wisely
subordinated and kept apart in the discourse, and ran together only in
minds like my own, eager for one or two other hearers to be specially
impressed by them. And one, at least, was. Before the third sentence of
the main discourse was finished the fierceness of the Baron's attention
was provoking me to ask myself whether a conscience also was not coming to
birth in him.

In a spiritual-material being, said the speaker, the spirit has a
rightful, happy share in every physical delight, and no physical delight
need be unclean in which the spirit can freely enjoy its just share as
senior member in the partnership of soul and body. Without this spiritual
participation it could not be clean, though church, state, and society
should jointly approve and command it. Mark, I do not answer for the truth
of these things; I believe them, but that is quite outside of our story.

The commonest error, he said, of those who covet spiritual cleanness is to