2) "possesses an importance which it is impossible for us even to conceive." In Protestant countries the influence of the Reformation, by rehabilitating sex as natural, indirectly tended to substitute in popular feeling towards sex the opprobrium of sinfulness by the opprobrium of animality.

Henceforth the sexual impulse must be disguised or adorned to become respectably human.

This may be illustrated by a passage in Pepys's _Diary_ in the seventeenth century.

On the morning after the wedding day it was customary to call up new married couples by music; the absence of this music on one occasion (in 1667) seemed to Pepys "as if they had married like dog and bitch." We no longer insist on the music, but the same feeling still exists in the craving for other disguises and adornments for the sexual impulse.

We do not always realize that love brings its own sanctity with it.
Nowadays indeed, whenever the repugnance to the sexual side of life manifests itself, the assertion nearly always made is not so much that it is "sinful" as that it is "beastly." It is regarded as that part of man which most closely allies him to the lower animals.