It was natural that Luther should put an end to fasting as well as celibacy. Both were expressions of the Oriental longing to attain the ideal condition of freedom from desire; both had been necessary factors in the education of the Germanic peoples. But at the same time it was unfortunately inevitable that Luther’s work of liberation should be inconclusive; that he was incapable of adopting the belief of the ancients in the divinity of humanity, the rights of nature; that he continually sought the sanctification of human nature by means exterior to itself. Someone has said that the courage of Luther the monk in marrying a nun was worth more than all his doctrine. That is a true saying. Filippo Lippi certainly did the same. The world gained thereby some magnificent madonnas and—Filippino Lippi. But neither Fra Filippo nor any other vow-breaking monk brought about a revolution: that was the achievement of Luther alone, who asserted his divine and natural right to his action. The problem of the present day is to follow up the consequences of this declaration of natural rights. But nature is no more infallible than she is perfect, no more reasonable than unreasonable, no more consistent than contrary in her purposes; since she is all these. She may be transformed—ennobled or debased—by culture, and therefore a natural declaration of rights implies only _the right of man consciously to cultivate nature_, so that in a certain direction she may fulfil her own purpose with a gradual approach to perfection; or, in other words, that the needs created by nature in and with human beings may by them be satisfied in a more beautiful and healthy way. But this culture of the erotic nature cannot find its moral criterion in any divine command or transcendental idea. _It can only find it in the same mysterious longing for perfection, which in the course of evolution has raised instinct into passion, passion into love, and which is now striving to raise love itself to an even greater love._ There are some who think that love should therefore advance a claim to a glory of its own, which is incompatible with its “natural” mission, namely the perpetuation of the race. Every one knows, however, that evolution brings about a more complicated, heterogeneous state than the original one; and in this respect love is the most conspicuous example. Love—as we have already shown—has now become a great spiritual power, a form of genius comparable with any other creative force in the domain of culture, and its production in that region is just as important as in the so-called natural field. Just as we now recognise the right of the artist to shape his work, or of the scientific man to carry out his investigations as it seems good to him, so must we allow to love the right to employ its creative force in its own way provided only that in one way or another it finally conduces to the general good.