Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/75

 can justly believe that many Romans felt it with its noble and better-compounded elements; turning away from the merely physical passion.

The preponderance of the instinct of similisexual love among Roman women is a matter of clear data, either through historians or belleslettres inference. By merely the references in Juvenal, we can draw plain enough inferences. It must have been general, at least in the intimately smart circles of social Rome. It is not referred to as of emotional consequence by the lyric poets; but rebuked by satirists. No Latin Sappho has sung it. No statutory codes paid attention to it, till the Christian régime attacked it as a moral and religious offence, like the masculine passion.

But the change was great on the advance of a New Faith into the social and legal and spiritual fabric of the pagan world. With the sternly prohibitory attitude toward so much that was human, assumed by a Christianity that was and remains Saturated with Judaism, similisexual love began to take-on swiftly, for the whole world a new aspect—that of a special and terrible sin. Hitherto it had been distinctively such—a sin per se, a sin by religious conviction—only to the Jew. But now that position was to be vastly strengthened in the new and yeasty social revolution, following the decline of Pagan Humanism. All earthly passions were looked at askance by the primitive and Apostolic teachers. Profane loves were snares that drew the heart from God, and from the working-out of personal salvation, during a short and delusive earthly life. The hermits and ascetics implored men and women to fight down all desires, save for Heaven. To love God and the agonized Redeemer must be man's absorbing passion. Thousands fled to the deserts and forests, to shut themselves away from the temptations and distractions of any human affections. The Mosaic