The religious ascetic is not common among us to-day. Yet the old seeking for something is there. The impulse towards asceticism has, I think, rather changed its form than passed from women. The place of the female saint is being taken by the social ascetic. Desire is not now set to gain salvation, but is turned towards a heightened intellectual individuation, showing itself in nervous mental activity. No one can have failed to note the immense egoism of the modern woman. Women are still in fear of life and love. They have been made ascetics through the long exercise of restraint upon their explosively emotional temperament. They have restrained their natures to remain _pure_. This false ideal of chastity was in the first place forced upon them, but by long habit it has been accentuated and has been backed up by woman's own blindness and fear. Thus to-day, in their new-found freedom, women are seeking to bind men up in the same bonds of denial which have restrained them. In the past they have over-readily imbibed the doctrine of a different standard of purity for the sexes, now they are in revolt--indeed, they are only just emerging from a period of bitterness in relation to this matter. Men made women into puritans, and women are arising in the strength of their faith to enforce puritanism on men. Is this malice or is it revenge? In any case it is foolishness. Bound up as the sexual impulse is with the entire psychic emotional being, there would be left behind without it only the wilderness of a cold abstraction. The Christian belief in souls and bodies separate, and souls imprisoned in vile clay, has wrought terrible havoc to women. I believe the two--soul and body--are one and indivisible. Women have yet this lesson to learn: the capacity for sense-experience is the sap of life. The power to feel passion is in direct ratio to the strength of the individual's hold upon life; and may be said to mark the height of his, or her, attainment in the scale of being. It is only another out of many indications of the strength of sexual emotion in women that so many of them are afraid of the beauty and the natural joys of love. There is one thing more I would wish to point out in closing this very insufficient survey of an exceedingly complicated and difficult subject. To me it seems that here, in this finer understanding of love, we open the door to the only remedy that will wipe out the hateful fear of women, which has wrought such havoc in the relationship between the sexes. Woman, restrained to purity, has of necessity fallen often into impurity. And men, knowing this better than woman herself, have feared her, though they have failed in any true understanding of the cause. Let me give you the estimate of woman which Maupassant, in _Moonlight_, has placed in the mouth of a priest. It is the most illuminating passage in one of the most exquisite of his stories--