Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/77

 had darkened existence with the gloom and gore of the Cross, so the sentiment-of Mary-worship was to effeminize the social and sexual life of the male.

We have now to consider briefly other legal aspects. Under Constantine and Justinian the similisexual passion took its place in relation to civil law as a felony, punishable with great severity—castration and death included. With the breaking-up of the Empire, and the parting of Europe and the rest of the world into the Mediaeval States, each established its own criminal laws and moral systems; but almost all were influenced directly by Roman and Christian conceptions. Hence the intolerant attitude to similisexual love grew only the stronger. The Church, with its severe Canon Law, made it a special matter for ecclesiastical punishment, like heresy, apostasy and other spiritual felonies. It became abhorred as the vice of vices, the very hell-poison of the Beast in mankind. It was visited with death by fire and torture.

And yet, when the sentiment of the Christian code of morals and laws so characterized it, the homosexual passion persistently held firm place in humanity. It was continually coming to the surface. By curious irony, the Church became a special conservatory for its cultivation, in spite of law and gospel. Under the mask of spiritually loathing it, the finer society of the mediaeval Italian, Teutonic and Gallic world was riddled-through with similisexual love. Except when deteriorated to a vulgar pederasty, or when associated with moral and physical offence and danger to the individual, thoughtful laic minds held back from attack upon a passion that, if refined, never could injure the moral and spiritual nature any more than could the heterosexual love. How rebuke an impulse which indeed was often part of the finest