The abominable old ideal of celibacy, with its hatred of womanhood, its distrust of happiness, its terror of devils, is not yet dead in the world. It is in our very bones, and is forever appearing in new and supposed to be modern forms. Take a man like Tolstoi, who gained enormous influence, not merely in Russia, but throughout the world among people who think themselves liberal--humanitarians, pacifists, philosophic anarchists. Tolstoi's notions about sex, his teachings and writings and likewise his behavior toward it, were one continuous manifestation of disease. All through his youth and middle years, as an army officer, popular novelist, and darling of the aristocracy, his life was one of license, and the attitude toward women he thus acquired, he never got out of his thoughts to his last day. Gorky, meeting him in his old age, reports his conversation as unpleasantly obscene, and his whole attitude toward women one of furtive and unwholesome slyness. But Tolstoi was in other ways a great soul, one of the great moral consciences of humanity. He looked about him at a world gone mad with greed and hate, and he made convulsive efforts to reform his own spirit and escape the power of evil. As regards sex, his thought took the form of ancient Christian celibacy. Man must repudiate the physical side of sex, he must learn to feel toward women a "pure" affection, the relationship of brother and sister. In his novel, "Resurrection," Tolstoi portrays a young aristocrat who meets a beautiful peasant girl and conceives for her such a noble and generous emotion; but gradually the poison of physical sex-desire steals into his mind, he seduces her, and she becomes a prostitute. Later in life, when he discovers the crime he has committed, he humbles himself and follows her into exile, and wins her to God and goodness by the unselfish and unsexual love which he should have maintained from the beginning. It was Tolstoi's teaching that all men should aspire toward this kind of love, and when it was pointed out to him that if this doctrine were to be applied universally, the human race would become extinct, his answer was that there was no reason to fear that, because only a few people would be good enough and strong enough to follow the right ideal! Here you see the reincarnation of the old Christian notion that we are "conceived in sin and born in iniquity." We may be pure and good, and cease to exist; or we may sin, and let life continue. Some choose to sin, and these sinners hand down their sinful qualities to the future; and so virtue and goodness remain what they have always been, a futile crying out in the wilderness by a few religious prophets, whom God has sent to call down destruction upon a world which He had made--through some mistake never satisfactorily explained!