Such terms of age are figurative, of course, unless we take them in a historical sense, meaning either that a new culture was developed in this country--or rather that there were fresh developments of an old culture--or that an old culture was introduced and maintained without significant change. This is not the place to discuss the cultural aspects of Colonial America, but it is important to bear in mind in any discussion of merely contemporaneous sex attitudes in this country the contributions of European, and more particularly, English morality. Without recalling the traditions of early Christianity or of English Puritanism, those attitudes of ignoring or suppressing the satisfactions of the impulses of sex to which we have referred were indeed incomprehensible and bewildering--mere psychological interpretation seems inadequate. But viewed as consequences of the sense of sin in connection with sex, which was a legacy from Paul and his successors in English Puritanism, interpretation is less difficult, and the American attitude toward sex becomes comparatively intelligible--the attitude seen in divorce and in the melodramas, and in the standardizing of sex relations, in accordance with that most significant of Pauline dogmas that marriage is the lesser of two evils, that it is better to marry than to burn. Without the key of Paul and of the obscenities of the early Christian Fathers how explain the recent legislation in Virginia making it a crime to pay attention to a married man or woman, or such a sermon as was recently preached somewhere in the Middle West urging a crusade against the practice of taking another man’s wife in to dinner or dancing round dances? “At a dinner of friends let every man take his own wife on his arm and walk in to their seats side by side at the dinner table to the inspiring music of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers,’” urged the minister. As to dancing, whenever a man is seen to put his arm around a woman who is not his wife, the band should cease playing. I do not quote the words of the latter injunction, as they are rather too indecent.