48 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY 



tically implanted a new instinct in our nature. For 

 the conviction entertained in Christian communities 

 as to passion being an unholy thing is now nothing 

 less than an instinct, and one that has shaped our 

 entire social life. The glimpses already given of pagan 

 and savage customs enable us to judge of the extent 

 of the moral revolution that Christianity has effected. 

 Outside certain schools of philosophy, such notions 

 of purity as now prevail were unknown to the ancients. 

 Nor do they obtain among nations or peoples who 

 have never come under the sway of Christianity. 

 The stigma attached by the Church to all that relates 

 to the reproduction of the species is a fact of which 

 the most enlightened Englishman at tlie present day 

 is more or less conscious. What other influence, we 

 may ask, could betray a writer like Lecky into de- 

 claring it to be " an ultimate fact in human nature 

 that the sexual side of our being is the lower side, 

 and that some degree of shame may appropriately be 

 attached to it"?^ It would surely be difficult to 

 maintain upon strictly philosophical grounds that an 

 instinct or an appetite upon which the very existence 

 of the human race depends is essentially a degraded 

 one. As well stigmatise eating and sleeping as 



* Lecky's History oj European Morals, 



