But my chief reason is the chaos of public opinion on this question. One is continually having this fact forced on one. Largely this is the result of transition and reaction. In England, the country to which I shall almost entirely confine myself, we have been enormously affected by that presentation of religion which has been called Puritanism. We have been steeped in the theology of Milton. All forms of religion--Catholic as well as Protestant--have been comparatively infected. When we speak of the "religious attitude" towards any question, we find ourselves irresistibly considering the Puritan attitude. It is not, I think, unfair to define the influence of Puritanism as a tendency to regard all amusement with disfavour. The original Puritans were notoriously dour in their manner and their dress. It has been said that they attacked the sport of bear-baiting, because it gave pleasure to the onlookers, and not because it was painful to the bears. Sunday, on which the outward observance of religion was necessarily concentrated, became a day of complete abstention from worldly recreation. Puritanism might supply spiritual compensation, but anything which gave pleasure to the senses was essentially evil. Thus art and beauty were banished from religious services and sacred buildings. Not only was the stage an entrance to hell, but a consistent Puritan like Bunyan prayed God to forgive him the sin of having played a game of hockey. Puritanism had reached its zenith, not of intensity but of universality, by the latter half of the last century. Those of us who are old enough to have been Victorians were brought up on comparative doses of the Puritan medicine. Especially among the middle-classes the history of every English family from the eighties till the War is extraordinarily similar; it consists of a series of emancipations. Our grandparents were almost entirely Puritan in their manner of living, our parents had compromised and extricated themselves to some degree, and our children have become almost wholly free. How many of us realize that up to the seventies it was quite improper for a lady to ride on the top of an omnibus? In no instance was the effect of Puritanism stronger than on sex. For sex is pre-eminently inspired by a desire for pleasure, whether it be spiritual, emotional, or carnal. On this score alone it would have been marked out as a deadly evil. But there was a further indictment in the Puritan creed. According to the Miltonian interpretation Paradise had been lost on account of the sex impulse; "original sin" was nothing more or less than the sense of sex--the loss of sexual ignorance. Accordingly the whole sex-nature was regarded as evil, and sex generally became a taboo, a closed subject to which no reference could be made. Victorian Puritanism often, indeed, suggests the ostrich burying his head in the sand--the attempt to remedy evil by pretending that it does not exist.