While, in spite of the accumulation of evidence to the contrary, Christianity’s share in the origin of human love is constantly exaggerated, sufficient stress has not been laid upon its indirect influence on the development of sexual love. It is true that all over the world—from Iceland to Japan—songs and legends are to be found which give glorious evidence of the power of love in the heart of man in all ages. But the sexual emotion, nevertheless, held a subordinate position in the life of the human soul until Christianity granted to woman also a soul to save—in other words, a personality to cultivate. Christianity, moreover commended the womanly rather than the manly virtues, and although Christ himself ignored woman, love, and the family life, his ethics became thus in an indirect form a glorification of woman. The importance attached by Christianity to the value of the individual as a soul—in contradistinction to the insistence by paganism on his value as a citizen—was likewise one of the unseen contributary causes which during the Middle Ages made love a life-power. In antiquity, marriage was a duty to society; friendship, on the other hand, was the free expression of sympathy. Not until man’s consciousness admitted a soul in woman, could personal love arise. But so mysterious are the influences through which the soul of mankind grows, that the youthful love of the ancients indirectly developed the need of sympathy also between grown men and women; and the suppression of the sexual instinct by Catholic asceticism indirectly furthered the introspective, soulful emotion of love which rises above sensuality. The modern view of love as the most lofty state of the soul had already taken shape in the time of the Crusades sufficiently to bring into existence at this period the Courts of Love in the south of France. Woman, the knight, and the singer together intensify and refine love, in part by laying stress upon its incompatibility with marriage! Students have shown how the refined expression of love in poetry corresponds with the forms of the sexual life of the upper classes, since monogamy became the law and a secret polygamy the custom. This dual division of the erotic feelings has on the one side brought about such fine and lofty, and on the other such coarse and debased manifestations that neither one nor the other has any counterpart among the nations—or classes within a nation—where this division is unknown, since there the freedom of sexual choice is undisputed. And this is natural; for there the sexual life preserves its innocence of “paradise,” one of simple animality perturbed by no higher consciousness. This innocence can only be replaced on a higher plane after a long period of development. The way thither is by the cleavage which “the division of labour” involves even in regard to the development of the feelings.