THE ETHICS OF SEX 199 



ways perhaps most effectively within recent 

 years, albeit with a certain inevitable inhibi- 

 tion of distinctive sex-expression. Here, of 

 course, is the great and pure, the ideal side 

 of the Greek Hetairae, of the ideal Abbey of 

 Thelema; here too lies the reasonable side 

 of the contentions of the freest novelists, so 

 far as these express the ideal of men and 

 women working together in frank fellowship, 

 making their distinctive, yet mutually im- 

 proved, contributions towards the better- 

 ment of the great human hive. 



But the question of questions, in which 

 religions alone have so constantly failed, and 

 which it is the task of science to help them to 

 answer, is : What of the actual and practical 

 present? How shall we reach this fuller 

 perfection of the human hive? Where has 

 it been expressed in the world? Rarely, 

 dimly, fantastically, if you will, yet surely 

 in some measure in chivalry, which was no 

 mere temporal ordering of things, still less 

 an efflorescence of insincere sentimentality, 

 but in large measure the provisional religion 

 of Western Feudalism, which grappled more 

 boldly than did the too passive orientalisms 

 to which we have been wont to restrict the 

 name religion, with the fundamental problems 

 of our daily life. 



In its noblest examples, the combination 

 of activity with purity was practically reached ; 

 not evaded by help of separate cloister walls, 

 as in the (so far profoundly less moral, however 

 superficially more moral) discipline of monas- 

 ticisms. For here lies the vital element of 

 chivalry, that each sex not only expresses its 



