Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/76

 toward similisexual love was affirmed and reaffirmed by presbyter and priest, by apostle and bishop. The tale of Sodom and Gommorrha was blackened into wholly a special sexual warning. The words of the Jewish ex-voluptuary, who became a pillar of the New Faith, St. Paul, and the allusions of other teachers were cited as the Voice of God concerning a pagan sin of sins; an awful impulse against Nature as perfected by God.

That this sentiment should take such Patristic force is easily understood. Such love was a distinct tendency toward pagan aestheticism. That above all, must be rooted out, annihilated with other earthly interests, other indulgences of the fleshly instincts. There was no place for them under the new dispensation. All profane love save altruistic benevolence to our neighbour, was a peril. Heterosexual love was pernicious enough; any other sort vastly worse. Woman was a snare. Had not Christ held aloof from her?—even if he had been the guest and friend of Martha and Mary. Marriage was tolerated for the laity; but the saintly must abide celibate, the holy-minded must have no personal knowledge of carnal lust.

This was not all. For the sentiment hostile to similisexual love, bent on making in the most depraved of instincts, increased just as the Catholic Church exaggerated its respect for the humble mother of the Redeemer. The new Faith made the worship of the Feminine-Abstract, the Blessed Lady the Immaculate Virgin, a mysterious, strenuous cult; even to displacing by it the just adoration of Christ. Woman, as typified by the Virgin, was held up as the ideal of the world-heart. Mariolatry, the fine flower of feminine concepts became the special policy of the Roman Church, in shrewd concession to human, aesthetic impulses, and in a perpetual combat of male sexualism. Just as