Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/276

 hagiology matured, the Church was hostile to all philarrenism as tending to undermine idealism of the Virgin Mary, and of woman-saints. As such cults, especially of the Virgin, became of the first importance in Latin Greek and Oriental Christianity, similisexual intercourse was blasted with the blackest curses. It tended to diminish marriages, and the rearing of Christian families. Yet the really Apostolic attitude toward uranianism is not particularly severe in the Canon. St. Paul rebukes it, as part of the social paganism which he would root out. Yet what Paul, a. Jew by birth and education, says against it is not stronger than his injunctions against irregular heterosexual relations, fornication, adultery. When he declares that "abusers of themselves with men" are not to inherit the Kingdom of God, and when he speaks of the topic in the often-cited passages in his Epistles, the apostle seems to animadvert against bestiality, vicious prostitutes of either sex, hired catamites and degraded lesbians, as much as against homosexuality. The other apostles are even more casual in their references, reprimanding particularly the gross and venal aspects of heathen similisexuality. But the Post-Apostolic Christianity developed and fortified denunciations of the homosexual as the almost nameless sinner of sinners.

Christ himself so far as any records that we possess inform us, never rebuked homosexuality. We can believe that Christ's silence was of intention; its origin being finest moral perspectives, profoundest intuitions into Nature's ethics. Adultery, a foe to social order (though to be pardoned) is denounced, with other carnal sins. But of homosexualism, so common about him, in all classes of Hebrew, Syrian, or Roman social life, Christ says not a word.

Indeed, as we study Gospel narratives and familiarize ourselves with Christ's emotional personality, have we not