The invention of dependable methods of preventing conception has carried this dissolution much further. Birth control has separated the sexual act from the whole series of social consequences which were once probable if not inevitable. For with the discovery that children need be born only when they are wanted, the sexual experience has become increasingly a personal and private affair. It was once an institutional affair—for the woman. For the man, from time immemorial, there have been two sorts of sexual experience—one which had no public consequences, and one which entailed the responsibilities of a family. The effect of the modern changes, particularly of woman’s economic independence and of birth control, is to equalize the freedom and the obligations of men and women. That the sexual life has become separated from parenthood and that therefore it is no longer subject to external regulation, is evident. While the desires of men and women for each other were links in a chain which included the family and the household and children, authority, and by that token religious authority, could hope to fix the sexual [p094] ideal. When the chain broke, and love had no consequences which were not too subtle for the outsider to measure, the ideal of love was fixed not by the church in the name of God, but by prudence, convention, the prevailing rules of hygiene, by taste, circumstances, and personal sensibility. 3. _Art_ _(a) The Disappearance of Religious Painting_ To walk through a museum of Western European art is to behold a peculiarly vivid record of how the great themes of popular religion have ceased to inspire the imagination of modern men. One can visualize there the whole story of the dissolution of the ancestral order and of our present bewilderment. One can see how toward the close of the Fifteenth Century the great themes illustrating the reign of a heavenly king and of the drama of man’s salvation had ceased to be naively believed; how at the close of the next century which witnessed the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, the beginnings of modern science, the growth of cities, and the rise of capitalism, religious painting ceased to be the concern of the best painters; and finally how in the last hundred years painters have illustrated by feverish experimentation the modern man’s effort to find an adequate substitute for the organizing principle of the religion which he has lost.