Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/313

love of one's neighbor it raised the natural instinct of man's fellowship with his kind into a religious commandment and promoted the perpetuation and prosperity of the human race; but when, at the same time, it condemned sexual love, it destroyed its own work, it sentenced mankind to annihilation and placed itself in opposition to nature with an hostility which seems born of the devil, to use one of its own expressions. The doctrine of love for one's neighbor conquered humanity, because it appealed to its most powerful instinct, the impulse for the preservation of the race. The doctrine of celibacy on the contrary, would have prevented the spread of the new religion completely, if it had not been for the fact that it appeared at a time when society had become thoroughly corrupt, when licentious egotism alone was ruling supreme and the relations between the sexes, diverted from their purpose of reproducing the species, had become degraded into a source of selfish enjoyment alone, polluted by all manner of crimes, so that it seemed an abomination to the conscience of the good. When this state of things became altered, when Christianity was no longer the reaction from the moral corruption of ancient Rome, it ceased to consider it necessary to protest against the excess of immorality by an excess of purity, and the dismal, inhuman doctrine of celibacy was forced into the background. The church ceased to exact it from all but a few of its children, the priests and the nuns, and even made the concession to nature of elevating marriage into a sacrament. The vows of celibacy taken by the monks and nuns did not prevent however, the greatest excesses within the walls of the cloisters, and during the Middle Ages, when Christianity exercised its highest authority upon mankind, immorality was almost as bad as during the time of the decline of Rome. Ever since the beginning of Religion,