with but a small chance of subsequent redemption by healthier occupations. The monasteries of southern Europe are foster-schools of even more baneful vices—crimes against Nature, which in the slave-dens of the Middle Ages were more frequent than in the most dissolute cities of pagan antiquity. Dr. Layton’s report on the result of the “Royal Commission of Investigation” (1538) describes the moral status of the British convents as an absolute ne plus ultra of imaginable corruption. The memoirs of Guiccardini and Pedro Sanchez depict a depth of immorality that would have revolted the libertines of the Neronic era. The indictment of Pope John XXII. contains forty-six specifications that can hardly be quoted in Latin. Jordanus Bruno, however, sums up the secret of such aberrations:
Insani fugiant mundum, immundumque sequuntur.
(The maniacs, despising earth, stray into unearthly abominations.)
The absurd interdictions of marriage on account of a difference in speculative opinions were for centuries [[54]]enforced with all the truculence of Inquisitorial butcher-laws; the espouser of a Jewess or a Morisca was burnt at the stake, together with his bride; even clandestine intercourse with an unbelieving paramour was punished with barbarous severity; and a similar prejudice still frowns upon the loves of Catholics and Protestants, of Christians and Mohammedans, and even Freethinkers. In Ireland the priest-encouraged custom of early marriages has filled the rural districts with starving children; in thousands of cities marriages of expedience invoke the curse of Nature on the traitors to the highest interests of our species. Every marriage, unsanctioned by love, avenges itself on several generations of innocent offspring, as well as directly in blighted hopes and years of unavailing regrets.
E.—REFORM.
Before we can hope to abate the prevalence of genetic abuses we must promote a more general recognition of the truth that the organism of the human body is subject to the same laws that govern the organic functions of our fellow-creatures; and that health does not dispense its blessings as a reward of prayer and theological conformity, but of conformity to the promptings of our sanitary intuitions. We must dispel the delusion which hopes to conciliate the favor of a miracle-working deity by sacrificing the physical interests of our species to the interests of a clerical dogma.
Like the seductions of Intemperance, the temptations of precocious Incontinence may be counteracted [[55]]by more abundant opportunities of diverting pastimes. According to the significant allegory of a Grecian myth, Diana, the goddess of hunters and forest-dwellers, was the adversary of Venus, and outdoor exercise is, indeed, the best preventive of sexual aberrations. Athletes are instinctively continent. Sensuality seems incompatible with a hardy, active mode of life, as that of hunters, trappers, and backwoodsmen. The stigma of public opinion alone would, however, suffice to reduce the frequency of premature marriages; for, in the island of Corsica, where the recognition of their baneful tendency is based on purely economical considerations (the perils of over-population), the dread of social ostracism has proved more deterrent than the fear of poverty and starvation.
In a community of Reformants (as the German philosopher Schelling proposed to call the friends of reform) twenty-five and thirty years should be accepted as the lawful minima of a marriage age, and the teachers of Secularism should lose no opportunity to plead the cause of Nature against the usurpations of priestcraft and conventionalism. Public opinion should be trained to the recognition of the truth that the sacrifice of love to lucre, caste-prejudice, and bigotry is a crime against the genius of mankind, and that a marriage, vetoed by the verdict of Nature, cannot be hallowed by the mumbling of a priest. [[56]]