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 sexualessentially" target="_blank" title="ad.本质上，基本上">essentially than he is essentially" target="_blank" title="ad.本质上，基本上">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 habituallydisregarded 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 openingsentence of

the precedingparagraph, 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 sexualexcitement 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.

CHAPTER THE THIRD
THE LIKENESS OF GOD

1. GOD IS COURAGE
Now having set down what those who profess the new religion regard

as the chief misconceptions of God, having put these systems of
ideas aside from our explanations, the path is cleared for the

statement of what God is. Since language springs entirely from
material, spatial things, there is always an element of metaphor in

theological statement. So that I have not called this chapter the
Nature of God, but the Likeness of God.

And firstly, GOD IS COURAGE.
2. GOD IS A PERSON

And next GOD IS A PERSON.
Upon this point those who are beginning to profess modern religion

are very insistent. It is, they declare, the central article, the
axis, of their religion. God is a person who can be known as one

knows a friend, who can be served and who receives service, who
partakes of our nature; who is, like us, a being in conflict with

the unknown and the limitless and the forces of death; who values
much that we value and is against much that we are pitted against.

He is our king to whom we must be loyal; he is our captain, and to
know him is to have a direction in our lives. He feels us and knows

us; he is helped and gladdened by us. He hopes and attempts. . . .
God is no abstraction nor trick of words, no Infinite. He is as

real as a bayonetthrust or an embrace.
Now this is where those who have left the old creeds and come asking

about the new realisations find their chief difficulty. They say,
Show us this person; let us hear him. (If they listen to the

silences within, presently they will hear him.) But when one
argues, one finds oneself suddenly in the net of those ancient

controversies between species and individual, between the one and
the many, which arise out of the necessarilyimperfect methods of

the human mind. Upon these matters there has been much pregnant
writing during the last half century. Such ideas as this writer has

to offer are to be found in a previous little book of his, "First
and Last Things," in which, writing as one without authority or

specialisation in logic and philosophy, as an ordinary man vividly
interested, for others in a like case, he was at some pains to

elucidate the imperfections of this instrument of ours, this mind,
by which we must seek and explain and reach up to God. Suffice it

here to say that theologicaldiscussion may very easily become like
the vision of a man with cataract, a mere projection of inherent

imperfections. If we do not use our phraseology with a certain
courage, and take that of those who are trying to convey their ideas

to us with a certain politeness and charity, there is no end
possible to any discussion in so subtle and intimate a matter as

theology but assertions, denials, and wranglings. And about this
word "person" it is necessary to be as clear and explicit as

possible, though perfect clearness, a definition of mathematical
sharpness, is by the very nature of the case impossible.

Now when we speak of a person or an individual we think typically of
a man, and we forget that he was once an embryo and will presently