Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/64

 is simply a relic of ancient Jewish, semi-civilized dispensations. Legislation against it utters a moral-social sentiment with which we have, today, rightfully, little or nothing to do.

More than this, however startling to us, let us observe also that similisexualism has never by right known any essential, even inferred, prohibition in the real Christian system. For, the position of the Gospel narratives, the attitude and expressions or silences of Christ as to it, point out differentially the fact that what the Apostles affirmed of it was on their own authority; merely part and parcel of the Judaism with which, from the very beginning, Christianity has been so loaded down. From that it suffers to-day only too much. The purest New Testament ethical dispensation ever should ignore homosexualism, when we look closely into the finer origins of gospel ethics. Our criminal laws, so much infused with old Canon Law, with mediaevally religious views, have perpetuated the hostile sentiment and error. In fact, the attitude of Christ toward many recondite human relations raises the question of how far Christ himself is an illustration of the emotion of similisexual love, with its concurrent reserve toward any warmer relationships to woman than that of son or friend or teacher. We also justly can infer that Apostolic Christianity pronounced against intersexualism through policy, quite as much as through moral antagonism of Jewish colour.

We reach now the race and the civilization commonly most associated with similisexual love, as an open element of emotion and civil life. The passion early received one of its names, "Greek love" from significance in almost every period of Hellenic society. It was instinctive to the Greek temperament, a temperament at once rugged and yet aesthetically sensitive as in no other race. Similisexuality long-time has been spoken