Page:Dr Stiggins, His Views and Principles.pdf/139

 ; while the head of the grinning Negro boy may stimulate an interest in missionary enterprise.

But here, I think, we must draw the line. We may be held up to derision as prudes and fanatics, the oft-quoted motto, honi soit qui mal y pense, may be hurled at our heads, we may be styled prurient, unclean, and I know not what else; but in spite of all clamour and all abuse we must say once for all that we cannot tolerate the making and the display of likenesses, in marble or bronze, in ivory or terra-cotta, of the naked human form. There is a point at which all modern peoples divide the endurably coarse from the intolerably indecent and abominable. Every civilised man has a limit beyond which he will not permit himself to be carried; and, what is of at least equal importance, he has a limit beyond which he will not knowingly allow those innocences, ignorances and inexperiences which are under his guardianship or control to travel. I say that this limit is overstepped when in defiance of every principle