Men, Women, and God Part 9

If, desiring to marry, they said that they wished to live out and to receive the equivalent of their board and lodging in money, they got in those pre-war days 18 a year extra. Is it to be wondered at that in that section of society it was a common saying that "only fools get married"? But it was not a chaste section of the community. Men are very seldom chaste when they live in exclusively male communities.

Then, secondly, sweating makes for immorality because it means that girls are paid wages which are quite insufficient to support life. Some of them live at home with their parents and so get through, but those who have to support themselves become subjected to a terribly severe temptation to add to their starvation wages by the sale of themselves.

It is still in this way that a considerable percentage of the prost.i.tutes of the country is created, and the number of girls who, though not known as prost.i.tutes, have sacrificed their purity because of financial pressure must be very great.

The word sweating also covers cases where workers are subjected to overwork, and unduly long hours; and therefore under this head I mention the influence of the strain of long shop hours. The improvement has been great of late in this respect, but still there are restaurants and special shops where the strain on girls is very heavy. And the result is that after work is over they are fit for nothing but walking about the streets in search of diversion. Many indeed who live in hostels have almost no choice between walking in the streets or going to bed. There is no need to say more. First girls are rendered nervously weary and yet eager for fresh air and movement, and then they have to face all that street life may mean. The recreations offered them in cinemas and music-halls are often calculated to give them just the wrong sort of excitement. And so first they are bored by monotony and long hours, and then played upon by rather low forms of suggestive art. It is here that girls' clubs and troops of girl guides meet the real needs of girls; and they probably const.i.tute the finest influence of the right sort which modern life offers them.

_Luxury_

One of the most serious evils in the modern world is that a great many men and women have far more money than is good for them, and that of these a considerable number are not under any necessity to work.

Nothing in all the wide world is worse for a man than to have lots of money and nothing to do. It is among these men that the patrons of expensive vice are to be found. Of necessity such men are bored by ordinary life. For life without work in it is always boring. It follows that they must seek excitement, and a very short time suffices for them to get all the excitement possible out of innocent recreations.

Wherefore in pursuit of something to stir them they take to the diversions that are not innocent, and often try to exploit their own pa.s.sions to give color to life. Their expensive and luxurious ways of life const.i.tute one of the worst moral forces in the community. They keep in existence to pander to their desires large numbers of subordinates whose lives are also worthless and without any productive value. It is because of them that the life of a courtesan seems to offer golden prizes to some, and the hope of reaping such prizes deludes many. Because this is a materialistic age their money gives them powers to which they have no moral right, and no more wholesome thing could happen to the whole community than that the necessary changes should be worked out which would make such noxious drones impossible in the future. It is for these people that sweated workers drudge and sweat. And then, under our curious and indefensible laws of inheritance, it is possible for wealth thus created to be pa.s.sed on from generation to generation, creating for each in turn the worst possible conditions for true life. It is utterly unreasonable to hope that we shall ever as a nation attain to moral health until this evil has been dealt with. It seems to matter little whether such people are married or unmarried; in both conditions they make havoc of s.e.xual life, and poison society.

_Drink_

I have kept to the last the social evil which more than all the others put together tends to produce s.e.xual immorality. As I have already said, it is a comparatively rare thing for a man to "go wrong" for the first time when he is entirely sober. It is Bacchus that conducts men into the courts of Venus. Mr. Flexner, who for scientific reasons made a comprehensive study of Prost.i.tution in Europe, reports that in every country the whole traffic is "soaked in drink." There are inhibitions in our humanity which make s.e.xual vice repulsive to our taste, and there are few who can get past these inhibitions until alcohol has deadened their better feelings. Man after man has told me that it was after some festive night when he had taken more wine than ever before that he first fell. Unmarried mothers have told me that what happened on the night that was fatal to them was that they were cajoled into taking champagne or whisky, and after that could not well remember what took place.

It is not too much to say that until we have grappled with the drink evil in our midst we cannot possibly hope to master this greater evil which follows on the heels of intemperance. This one consideration alone would make me an enthusiastic prohibitionist. We have tried life on the present terms and it has beaten us. We have allowed the common sale of a drug that is the proved enemy of our best life. It has damaged us physically, industrially, and financially. But its most deadly damage has been done in connection with our s.e.xual life. It not only misleads the unmarried, but in many homes it is daily destroying all possibility of married happiness. No doubt the difficulties of temperance reform are very great. But the real cause of the delay of effective reform is want of will in the community as a whole. I cannot but think that if the deadly and intimate connection between drink and s.e.xual vice were realized, the will to effective reform might appear among us.

When I consider all the forces which I have thus briefly reviewed, and remember that behind them there is the power of a central and universal human instinct, I no longer wonder that s.e.xual follies abound in our country, and that we have not yet solved the problem of purity. What I do wonder at is that there are hundreds of thousands of young men and women who, in spite of all these facts, insist on living clean and pure lives. There is something in human nature that fights very hard for the true way of life. Boys and girls with bad hereditary influences to hamper them, and brought up in very unfavorable surroundings, do yet constantly refuse to succ.u.mb. Even those who have made mistakes constantly refuse to be beaten, and hold on tenaciously to the narrow way. Though the modern world has been deluged with novels written to display s.e.xual irregularities in a romantic light, and to express contempt for Christian moral standards, and though no doubt thousands have been misled, it remains true that surprisingly large numbers refuse to be befooled in such ways. I believe the reason is that, strong as mere physical desire may be, love is a stronger thing still.

And it is the power of love that keeps many right. In many men it is love for an ideal woman that does it. They keep themselves from evil because, though they may never have met her, they believe one day they will, and they want to bring her their best selves without any spot of defilement. In many girls love works in the same redemptive way. And perhaps in both what is really working is a mystic longing after the best that life can hold, and a half-conscious understanding that that best is only for those who preserve unity between body and spirit, and keep the body in bonds until the pure command of love itself summons it to freedom.

And yet it is infamous that the struggle should be so hard for so many.

All of us who are ignorant or complacent or skeptical about the social evils of our time are sharers in the iniquity of those who fall. Many of us live in mean satisfaction, just because we ourselves have found comfort and security; that is how these evil forces are able to go on year after year leading thousands to their undoing. If the test of a real pa.s.sion for purity lies in caring about the forces that make for impurity and caring to the point of suffering for those who fall, then I fear few of us have that pa.s.sion in any really effective and holy form. And it will need pa.s.sion to compete with the forces that lie behind evil social conditions. They are entrenched behind the power of money, and I know of only one pa.s.sion that is stronger than money.

When will all who really love take up the challenge of this disordered modern world? We talk. We confer. We discuss social reform. But we do not love. And that is why Mammon is able to laugh at us, and go on dragging our boys and girls down into the mire.

CHAPTER XIII

FORGETTING THE THINGS WHICH ARE BEHIND

I have implied in this book that the very best in s.e.xual experience is only for those who keep themselves unspotted in early life, and who come to the sacrament of marriage with no previous and lower experience of s.e.x intimacy. I am even sure that the very best is spoilt a little by all previous unworthy thinking, and by all perverse practices.

I know that that will sound a hard saying to very many, for there are few who have fulfilled these conditions for knowing the best. It must seem to them that I am practically saying to them, "You can never now enter into the holy of holies." Yet I cannot alter what I have said, however acute may be my sympathy with those who have stumbled. I believe it is true, and no good ever came of hiding the truth. It is because it is true that I have such confident hope for mankind. Men and women do in their hearts want the very best, and when they come to know what are the only terms on which that very best can be had they will, I believe, accept those terms.

But this would be a cruel book, and a false book too, were I to imply that there is no way in which the past can be forgotten and forgiven, and no way into purity and joy even for those who have wandered. Were that so I could not write at all about this subject, for it would then be too tragic.

Perhaps the worst consequence of aberrations in thought and conduct is that they make it very very hard to be perfectly happy and unashamed when at last love calls them to enter into the inner chambers of marriage and romance. The shadows that rest at times on that part of marriage even for some very happy lovers are due to the fact that the man (or sometimes the woman) was once involved in something else before that was a little like it, and yet was haunted then by a sense of wrong-doing and so could not have a perfect experience. It is only to the pure that _all_ things are pure.

But it is _not_ true that the past need dog and spoil the future. It is not true that sin is irremediable, nor that its stains remain for ever.

The essential and central thing in Christianity is the a.s.sertion that there is a remedy for the situation that sin creates.

I do not think there is any remedy to be found in simply trying to ignore the past--or in saying that our aberrations were only those of ninety per cent. of mankind, and were so natural as to be not worth bothering about. In such ways we may push the past out of sight, but we do not deal with it. It remains there though out of sight. For the fact is that such sayings do not quite convince us, and therefore they cannot kill the past.

Nor is there any remedy to be found merely in the forgiveness of man or of woman. Women are proverbially, and perhaps divinely, willing to forgive. But a woman's forgiveness does not necessarily make a man able to forgive himself. Nor does it always cleanse an unclean inner life.

To many a man it has been just the fact that his fiancee or wife was so sublimely willing and able to forgive that has revealed to him his own unworthiness and made it sting the more.

No! there has got to be something much more drastic in our lives if we are to get free from shame and remorse. We have got to go down into that stony valley of humiliation where men and women face the naked facts before their G.o.d, and stop all attempt to hide or to deceive. We have got to stop the sophistries which are so dear to us, and through which we try to put the blame on others, or on circ.u.mstance, or on fate. We have got to face the fact that the evil things--whatever they were, either small or great--happened because we were weak--because we put pleasure before duty--because we gave in to l.u.s.t, or evil suggestion, or a craven longing to please the flesh. Yes! They happened because we were weak, and that is a horrible thing to have to admit.

Yet admitting it is the only way to regain contact with the truth. And what next? The next thing is that in that extremity we find G.o.d. It might seem that He would probably be the last one to be found through humiliation and the open admission of being impure. But in actual experience that is how He is found. That is His way--to meet the man who has discovered his own insufficiency--to intervene at the desperate minute--to reveal to incarnate weakness His eternal strength--to give a strange a.s.surance that He Himself is about to enfold the man or woman in His power, and tale charge of the future. And when that has happened a man knows what to do with his past. He can leave it with G.o.d, and then it loses at once all power to haunt him or put him to shame. It was unclean, but the cleansing fires of the divine love have taken it in charge, and its power is broken. That is something very different from trying to hide it or trample upon it. That is really killing it, and after that a man both may and can forget.

"If any man be in Christ he is a new creature." That is literally true even in this connection. Spiritually a man ceases to be the same person as the one who was once so weak and unclean. He has entered a new spiritual country.

Experience has proved all this over and over again. Men who in early youth were wild have by the grace of G.o.d become so essentially pure as to become capable of true and blessed experiences of love and all that love leads to with a fine woman. But it does need the grace of G.o.d.

Those who attempt simply to forget and make light of their early follies do not escape from them.

And why should I not boldly say the same thing--exactly the same thing-- about a woman? It is certainly true. No one seriously believes that the redeeming grace of G.o.d, which is sufficient for all other sins, fails before this one. No one who has understood Christ doubts that He can make a new woman, and a pure and n.o.ble woman, out of one who has stumbled. And yet curiously society has never learnt to forgive women.

A man is allowed to forget the things which are behind. Generally a woman is compelled to remember them till the very end. I shall never forget being once at a meeting of men in New York where a very great American woman spoke to us all on this subject. She pointed out to us that society had never learnt to control the evils of this part of life because it had never learnt to adopt the method of Jesus, which was frank and full forgiveness. We have been afraid. We have thought it would be socially disastrous. But Jesus had no hesitation in His voice when He said to a penitent Magdalene, "Neither do I condemn thee, go and sin no more." Of course she sinned no more. There is in all the universe no constraining force like that combination of forgiveness and trust.

I am sure we cannot make our standard too high. I am sure we need to guard against all compromise in thought with its august demands. But I am equally sure we need to learn to forgive generously if we are ever to help those who have stumbled. Forgiving sinners does not mean condoning sin, else could there never be any divine forgiveness. What it does mean is loving the persons concerned. Till we learn to exercise that divine art, we do but shut the doors of hope against sinners and push them farther down.

Of course this means that for a pagan society there is no choice between a sternly cold and cruel morality on the one hand, and license on the other. For pagans cannot forgive. They alternate between a moral indifference in which there is no hope for anybody, and a cold and callous condemnation of sinners which is both hypocritical and cruel.

We have all seen both policies in action and know how hopeless they both are. But in exact proportion as we learn to think and feel with Christ we shall learn to forgive, and so doing shall begin to have mastery over the evils in s.e.x life that spring from ignorance, waywardness, want of discipline, and the misunderstanding of love.

History is one long record of how by the force of law and by alternate severity and carelessness the human race has tried to find for itself the right path through this special country. But the record is largely one of failure. There is no way of success for a society that depends upon such forces. Here as in a dozen other connections the only way to life is that Christian way which the world has so largely repudiated.

Mankind want to make a success of their life in this world--want to make the most possible of it--but they want it apart from the leaders.h.i.+p of Christ, and so they miss it. He can show us the way of life if we will but listen, but no other can.

And His way is always and altogether the way of love--love that can tame the brute in us and make it a servant--love that can transform pa.s.sion into a holy fire--love that makes men patient and women generous--that takes the common things of life and makes them sacred-- and above all love that can hate sin with fierce sincerity, and yet love and forgive sinners.

It is after this fas.h.i.+on that G.o.d loves us. We must so love one another if we are to make human life great.

There is another and a larger sense in which there is need that we should forget the things which are behind. We need as a race to escape from an evil past. Our greatest danger in this whole connection is the danger of moral skepticism. "s.e.x vice has always been common," men say with truth; and then with fatal unreason they add, "and always will be." That way lies sheer disaster. The whole situation calls for faith in man's future--faith in his capacity for purity--faith in love. And that faith is really but a part of any true faith in G.o.d.

In the past even Christian people have tried to evade the problem of s.e.x. The truth about it has not been openly sought. Its challenge has not been bravely met. Its possibilities have not been realized. And therefore fears, sufferings, excesses, cruelties, and injustice to women have degraded our common life. The whole matter is central for our civilization. While we think and work for reconstruction we would do well to remember that there can be no happy and harmonious life for us till this whole problem has been solved--till we have learnt to enthrone pure love in our midst and by its pa.s.sionate and cleansing power to subdue the brute and exercise our complete humanity to the glory of G.o.d. Love never faileth. It purifies pa.s.sion and dominates the flesh. If we believe in G.o.d we needs must believe in the triumph of love; and that means a divine consummation at last to all our wanderings and struggles in connection with s.e.x.

APPENDIX

A BRIEF SKETCH OF SOME OF THE PHYSIOLOGICAL FACTS

BY

A. CHARLES E. GRAY, M.D. (ED.)