it to the very foundation. "Cursed be the ground for thy sake." The fall of the creature, however, is only an hypothesis by which faith drives from its mind the burdensome, disquieting contradiction, that Nature is a product of God, and yet, as it actually is, does not harmonise with God, i.e., with the Christian sentiment. Christianity certainly did not pronounce the flesh as flesh, matter as matter, to be something sinful, impure; on the contrary, it contended vehemently against the heretics who held this opinion and rejected marriage. (See for example Augustin. contra Faustum, l. 29, c. 4, l. 30, c. 6. Clemens Alex. Stromata, lib. iii. and Bernard. Super Cantica, Sermo 66.) But quite apart from the hatred to heretics which so inspired the holy Christian Church and made it so politic, this protest rested on grounds which by no means involved the recognition of Nature as such, and under limitations, i.e., negations, which make the recognition of Nature merely apparent and illusory. The distinction between the heretics and the orthodox is only this, that the latter said indirectly, covertly, secretly, what the former declared plainly, directly, but for that very reason offensively. Pleasure is not separable from matter. Material pleasure is nothing further, so to speak, than the joy of matter in itself, matter proving itself by activity. Every joy is self-activity, every pleasure a manifestation of force, energy. Every organic function is, in a normal condition, united with enjoyment; even breathing is a pleasurable act, which is not perceived as such only because it is an uninterrupted process. He therefore who declares generation, fleshly intercourse, as such, to be pure, but fleshly intercourse united with sensual pleasure to be a consequence of original sin and consequently itself a sin, acknowledges only the dead, not the living flesh--he raises a mist before us, he condemns, rejects the act of generation, and matter in general, though under the appearance of not rejecting it, of acknowledging it. The unhypocritical, honest acknowledgment of sensual life is the acknowledgment of sensual pleasure. In brief, he who, like the Bible, like the Church, does not acknowledge fleshly pleasure--that, be it understood, which is natural, normal, inseparable from life--does not acknowledge the flesh. That which is not recognised as an end in itself (it by no means follows that it should be the ultimate end) is in truth not recognised at all. Thus he who allows me wine only as medicine forbids me the enjoyment of wine. Let not the liberal supply of wine at the wedding at Cana be urged. For that scene transports us, by the metamorphosis of water into wine, beyond Nature into the region of supernaturalism. Where, as in Christianity, a supernatural, spiritual body is regarded as the true, eternal body, i.e., a body from which all objective, sensual impulses, all flesh, all nature, is removed, there real, i.e., sensual fleshly matter is