seek a purification of self for self-purification's sake.

The Baron grunted. He was drinking in the words; had forgotten his
surroundings.

Only those are clean, continued the speaker, whose every act, motive,
condition is ordered according to their best knowledge of the general
happiness, whether that happiness is for the time embodied in millions, or
in but one beyond themselves. Through errors of judgment they may fall
into manifest outward uncleannesses; but they, and none but they, are
clean within.

Because women, he went on, are in every way more delicately made than men,
we easily take it for granted they are more spiritual. From Genesis to
Revelation the Bible never does so. It is amazing how feeble a sense of
condemnation women--even as compared with men--often show for the _spirit_
of certain misdeeds if only it be unaccompanied by the misdeed's
performance; or what loathing so many of them--"of you," he really said,
and the Baron grunted as though his experience had been with droves of
them--what loathing so many of you heap upon certain things without
reference to the spirit by which they are accompanied and on which their
nobility or baseness, their cleanness or foulness, entirely depends.

Nothing is unclean that is to no one anywhere unjust or unkind; and
nothing is unjust, unkind, or unclean which cannot easily be shown to be
so without inventing an eleventh commandment. To him, he said, no
uncleanness was more foul than that which, not for kindness, or for
righteousness, but for a fantastical, self-centred refinement, invents
some eleventh commandment to call that common which God hath cleansed; to
call anything brutish which the incarnation of the soul has made sacred to