Her purpose (who shall write a new myth of the rubber-tree, Death’s subtle gift?), but if you love Life you must love Her, and if you puritanically say She is not, you are both a fool and Death’s servant. If you hate Life, if you think the suffering outweighs the pleasure, if you think it the supreme crime to transmit life, then you must indeed dread Her as the author of the supreme evil—Life. Elizabeth and George talked and found each other delightful. They thought it was their interest in art and ideas. Delightful error! All the arts of mankind are the Cyprian’s hand-maids, and even the chaster and tweeded spectre Sport has unwittingly been made Her pander—for with no grudging hand does the Goddess scatter Her gifts, smiling upon the amorous play of children and not disdaining even those who desire their own sex. She is beneficent and knows there are only too many ready to propagate and is not anxious to create too many victims for Hunger, and therefore patronizes even the heretics of Sparta and Lesbos.... * * * * * We should turn churches into temples to Venus, and set up a statue to Havelock Ellis, the moral Hercules who has partially succeeded in cleansing the Augean stable of the white man’s mind.... * * * * * Under the benign influence of the Cyprian they talked, they went on talking. They had drifted on to the topics of Christ and Christianity, that interminable _pons asinorum_ of youthful discussions. “But I think Christ is wonderful,” Elizabeth was saying with an air of having discovered something, “because he completely ignored social values and considered people only for what they really were in themselves. It is so strange to think of his being made the pretext for the world’s most elaborate system of priest-craft when the whole of his life and teaching are a protest against it.” “The bohemian Christ? But have you noticed what a Proteus he is? Everybody interprets the historical Jesus to please himself. He is a whole mythology in himself. If you really try to discover the historical Jesus, you find you keep stripping away veil after veil, and then just as you think you are coming to the real figure, you find there’s nothing there. But, I grant you, Christ is a very sympathetic figure. What I cannot endure is Christianity and the harm it has done Europe. I detest its system of values, its persecution, its hatred of life (it worships a tortured and expiring god), its cult of self-sacrifice and sexual aberrations, like sadism, masochism and chastity....” Elizabeth laughed, a little shocked. “Oh, oh! Now you are exaggerating!”