To the mediaeval theologian, man was by nature vile. We have seen that, according to the Christian Epic, he was assoiled from birth with the primeval sin of his first parents, and began to darken his score with fresh offenses of his own as soon as he became intelligent enough to do so. An elaborate mechanism was supplied by the Church for washing away the original pollution and securing forgiveness for later sins. Indeed, this was ostensibly its main business. We may still well ask, Is man by nature bad? And accordingly as we answer the question we either frame appropriate means for frustrating his evil tendencies or, if we see some promise in him, work for his freedom and bid him take advantage of it to make himself and others happy. So far as I know, Charron, a friend of Montaigne, was one of the first to say a good word for man's animal nature, and a hundred years later the amiable Shaftesbury pointed out some honestly gentlemanly traits in the species. To the modern student of biology and anthropology man is neither good nor bad. There is no longer any "mystery of evil". But the mediaeval notion of _sin_--a term heavy with mysticism and deserving of careful scrutiny by every thoughtful person--still confuses us. Of man's impulses, the one which played the greatest part in mediaeval thoughts of sin and in the monastic ordering of life was the sexual. The presuppositions of the Middle Ages in the matter of the relations of men and women have been carried over to our own day. As compared with many of the ideas which we have inherited from the past, they are of comparatively recent origin. The Greeks and Romans were, on the whole, primitive and uncritical in their view of sex. The philosophers do not seem to have speculated on sex, although there was evidently some talk in Athens of women's rights. The movement is satirized by Aristophanes, and later Plato showed a willingness in _The Republic_ to impeach the current notions of the family and women's position in general. But there are few traces of our ideas of sexual "purity" in the classical writers. To the Stoic philosopher, and to other thoughtful elderly people, sexual indulgence was deemed a low order of pleasure and one best carefully controlled in the interests of peace of mind. But with the incoming of Christianity an essentially new attitude developed, which is still, consciously or unconsciously, that of most people to-day.