"Among the subjects discussed the other night at the Arena you spoke of something your friend Remy de Gourmont told you. You remember? It was to this effect: that mankind, all organic life, is the slave of its reproductive organs; that those ancient cults were justified in worshipping the phallus, and the female sex-principle. Do you know, Ulick, that the teaching of our Church doesn't widely differ from that horrible idea. Sexuality is our master--if we let it rule; from that to the worship of those organs, in a word, devil worship, is only a step. I wonder you haven't noticed the grimly brief distance between the highest type of intellect, if not guided by faith, and the beasts of the field. The most depraved of degenerates sometimes have been men of lofty genius and in their fall they grovelled in filth. Gods become gorillas. De Maupassant on all fours eating his excrements, as did Voltaire; poor Nietzsche, a victim of drugs and like Stendhal slain by syphilis; Baudelaire wallowing in nastiness at his end; Heine, a victim to sexual over-indulgence, dying from tabes dorsalis; Huysmans, punished for his early blasphemies and his self-confessed degeneracies, dies of cancer in the throat; Ibsen gone mad, and the religious degenerate, Tolstoy, too; Oscar Wilde----" "What a preacher you will make, Milt," enthusiastically exclaimed Ulick. "But while you are dragging in those awful examples, why not adduce the names of abnormally normal genius: Plato, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Montaigne, Napoleon, Beethoven, Thackeray and their specific maladies mental and moral...." Milt shook his head. "I'm only thinking of you, Ulick." "Thanks for the compliment. Nice company you put me in. No wonder you recommend a course of conjugal calisthenics...." He laughed aloud. "No joke, my boy. You don't drink or smoke. Good. But you are living in a bog of slimy voluptuousness. As Odo of Cluny has written of man's connection with woman: 'Quomodo ipsum stercoris saccum amplecti desideramus,' and for this 'sack of dung'--don't wince, those monks had the unpleasant habit of calling things by their right names--for this vain, skin-deep beauty, harboring all manners of impurities, you are risking your hopes of heaven"! "How unfair you fanatics are! Why throw muck at the very source of life! We are conceived in corruption, in sin, according to the Church. But how could the Church get souls were it not for this same fornication, despised and berated? Don't speak of sanctification by the sacraments. Fornication is fornication, and were it not for the 'sin' we wouldn't be sitting here. That's what I can't understand; the divorce of theory and practice. Don't start in Milt, let me finish first. Havelock Ellis writes: 'When we find it assumed that there are things good to do and not good to justify we may strongly suspect that we have come across a mental muddle.' And that's gospel truth. Hypocrisy rules the world. In fact, life without hypocrisy is unthinkable.