must needs be the substratum of all things, may be. Feeling OF IT,
feeling BY IT, I cannot feel afraid of it. I think I had got quite
clearly and finally to that adjustment long before my Cambridge days
were done. I am sure that the evil in life is transitory and finite
like an accident or distress in the nursery; that God is my Father
and that I may trust Him, even though life hurts so that one must
needs cry out at it, even though it shows no consequence but
failure, no promise but pain. . . .

But while I was fearless of theology I must confess it was
comparatively late before I faced and dared to probe the secrecies
of sex. I was afraid of sex. I had an instinctive perception that
it would be a large and difficult thing in my life, but my early
training was all in the direction of regarding it as an irrelevant
thing, as something disconnected from all the broad significances of
life, as hostile and disgraceful in its quality. The world was
never so emasculated in thought, I suppose, as it was in the
Victorian time. . . .

I was afraid to think either of sex or (what I have always found
inseparable from a kind of sexual emotion) beauty. Even as a boy I
knew the thing as a haunting and alluring mystery that I tried to
keep away from. Its dim presence obsessed me none the less for
all the extravagant decency, the stimulating silences of my
upbringing. . . .

The plaster Venuses and Apollos that used to adorn the vast aisle
and huge grey terraces of the Crystal Palace were the first
intimations of the beauty of the body that ever came into my life.
As I write of it I feel again the shameful attraction of those