degradation; it is the focus of our self-awareness. The awareness of nakedness may further be a symbol of the awareness of vulnerability, of exposure to pain that must come with self-consciousness.

No doubt from the earliest days of Christianity there have been men and women for whom the sexual relationship was illumined and deepened by the Christian message of love, for whom it expressed a true equality, an equal-sided valuation and respect, for whom coitus was an expression of tenderness and unity, not merely the gratifica­tion of animal urges. But it is one of the great tragedies of history that not until recent times has this implication of Christianity found public expression.

The Rev. Dr. Sherwin Bailey, a leading Anglican authority on this subject, can find no evidence of this expression in any theological writing before the appearance in the seventeenth century of Holy Living, by Jeremy Taylor, a married bishop of the English Church who owed much to the support and companionship of his wife. In that book coitus is for the first time referred to as an act that relates two people in togetherness. It was an experience “to lighten the cares and sadnesses of household affairs, and to endear each other.” Dr. Bailey writes, “Taylor maintains that marriage is the queen of friendships, and husband and wife the best of all friends; the love that binds them together is a ‘union of all things excellent’: it contains in it proportion and satisfaction and rest and confidence.”

In contrast to this, for the previous fifteen hundred years almost every writer and leader in the Church, both Catholic and Reformed, regarded sexuality as unavoidably tainted with sin, and the sex- relationship in marriage (apart from procreation) as a licensed outlet for the bestial impulses in man. This latter concept of marriage is overwhelmingly repulsive to many of us now, yet it is no exaggeration to say that it has lingered in the Church almost to the present day, and only recently has it become possible to be married in church without hearing an echo of it in the marriage service.

Dr. Bailey, writing of earlier centuries, says: “...the general impression left by the Church’s teaching upon simple and unlearned people can only have been that the physical relationship of the sexes was regarded by religion as unworthy, if not as shameless and obscene. The effect of such teaching must necessarily have been grave; it caused a distortion of principles and values which has left an indelible mark upon Christian sexual thought and we can only guess at the psychological disturbances and conflicts which it has produced in the lives of individuals.”

Only in the present century have Christians dared in any general way to follow in the steps of Jeremy Taylor and to accept that, irrespective of any other purpose, coitus can be justified and dignified as the expression of a deep relation between two persons. We do not blame Christianity and Christians of earlier centuries; we can seek the origin of misconceived attitudes in the compromise between pagan and Christian thought and in the social conditions of the Dark Ages.

We have then to reject the idea that there is anything necessarily sinful about sexual activity. A better understanding of the nature and value of myth, and a more scientific approach to problem’s of