[WT Sharpe]

I wonder if many of Wilde's troubles with the powers-that-were could have had their origin with those who may have felt the book was an attack on religion? For example, after the remarkable passage where he says this of Gray:

It was rumoured of him once that he was about to join the Roman Catholic Communion; and certainly the Roman ritual had always a great attraction for him. The daily sacrifice, more awful really than all the sacrifices of the antique world, stirred him as much by its superb rejection of the evidence of the senses as by the primitive simplicity of its elements, and the eternal pathos of the human tragedy that it sought to symbolise.

He then proceeds to marginalize religion with this passage:

But he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable for the sojourn of a night, or for a few hours of a night in which there are no stars and the moon is in travail.

Indeed, in another passage, Wilde has Lord Henry saying:

Religion consoles some. Its mysteries have all the charm of a flirtation, a woman once told me; and I can quite understand it. Besides, nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner.

That last line, "nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner," seems a particularly pointed jab at the very heart of the God religions in general and Christianity in particular. It turns the humble confession of being the chief of sinners that the unknown writer of I Timothy attributed to Paul of Tarsus into a proud boast. I can see why the religious of his day would be angry with Wilde for more than just his sexuality.