It is not, therefore, in any intolerant spirit that would deny the inevitableness of the carnal life that I touch upon “The Apotheosis of the Harlot.” I simply wish to show, in the broadest and most liberal temper, that even the most inevitable and legitimate passion of humanity must be kept restrained within bounds, or the whole of human life forfeits its hope and dignity and purpose. Nature can parody herself in the excess of madness. The sanity of human life, social institutions, and all intellectual activity is imperilled when the passions of the blood, and especially passions perverted, obtain an exaggerated dominance over the emotions and passions of the mind. That there is a decided drift toward this ascendancy of the Pander and the Harlot in the social and intellectual life of modern democracy, is beyond all sort of doubt, and cannot be blinked by any clear minded and untainted observer. That is, any observer who is not in fee of one of these gigantic enterprises which flourish upon the epidemic of mediocrity. There is an odd and strange obliquity of moral vision that accompanies optimism professed as a probable investment in the follies of the credulous. Of course the triumph of the Harlot in great affairs and destinies is nothing new. She has swayed courts and kings and empires from antiquity, and there is no moral force in human society that can ever disturb this firmly established and most stable of all human institutions. Dynasties totter, empires fall into ruins, religions decline, philosophies shrivel to empty names, nations perish and their history is lost, civilization advances or decays, but the Harlot plays her fateful part in the destinies of the race. She is almost as important a factor in molding the purpose and character of humanity as the mother. Her potent and unassailable dominion of the minds of men is due to the eternal fantasy of human passion, and whatever may be the prevailing code of morals, she will hold her sway of wreck and ruin to the end of time. To rail against an institution so inherent in the constitution of human affairs is sheer folly. Indeed, it may be almost said to be flying in the face of Providence, since the only providence which we know to be effective in this world is the unfailing crookedness of human nature.