Sex and Common-Sense Part 2

In considering this view, I want first to point out that although to have no legal or enforceable tie in s.e.x-relations.h.i.+ps seems on the surface much the simplest and easiest way to arrange life, although permanent monogamous marriage is exceedingly difficult and inconvenient, yet the movement of humanity does seem to have been on the whole in that direction. It is, of course, untrue to say that among primitive peoples there is anything that can fairly be called promiscuity. Historians and anthropologists have taught us that among all peoples, however barbarous, there are conventions, sanctions, tabus, by which the relations of men and women are regulated.

The customs of such people may seem to us mere licence; but they are not so. And some of the customs of more "civilized" countries are at least as horrifying to the "savage" as his can be to us. Nevertheless, it is true to say that as civilization advances, and especially where the position of women improves, the movement has been towards a more stable and exclusive form of marriage. We grope uncertainly towards it: we fail atrociously. Yet we do not abandon an ideal which asks so much of human nature that human nature is continually invoked to prove its impossibility.

Why have we persisted? It is idle to speak of monogamy as though it were a senseless rule imposed on unfortunate humanity by some all-powerful Superman. We have imposed it on ourselves. It is our doing. Why have we done it? Surely because, in spite of its alleged "impossibility," its obvious inconveniences, there is some need in human nature which demands a permanent and a stable s.e.x relations.h.i.+p to meet it.

I believe that there is something in our human nature which desires stability in its relations with other human beings. It is perhaps a recognition of the fact that, though we live in time and suffer its conditions, we are immortal also and chafe under too strict a bondage to time. Our relations with other human beings ought not to be evanescent!

There is something cheap and shoddy in the giving and taking of human personality on such easy soon-forgotten terms. It is not only in s.e.xual relations that this is true. It is true of all human intercourse. The longer care and devotion of human parents for their offspring is not a physical only, but a spiritual necessity: and it is bound up with the greater faithfulness of human lovers. In parenthood, in loverhood, in friends.h.i.+p, those who take their obligations lightly are not the finer sort of men and women, but the slighter, cheaper make. It is not a love of freedom but a certain inferiority and shoddiness that makes it possible for us to give ourselves, and take others, lightly. For in all human relations.h.i.+ps it is "ourselves" that we give and take. It is not what your friend does for you or gives to you that makes him your friend; but what he _is_ to you. It is his personality that you have shared. And so there is something rather repulsive in quickly forgetting or throwing it away.

People who make friends and lose them as the trees put out their leaves in spring to shed them in the autumn, are not quite human. The capacity to make friends--to make many friends--is a great power: the capacity to lose them not so admirable. Yet there are people who always have a bosom-friend, every time you meet them; only it is never the same friend. And this is a poor sort of friends.h.i.+p, for it _is_ poor to give and take so little that you easily cease or forget to give at all.

If this is true of friends, it is not less true of lovers: it is more true. For s.e.x-love includes more of one's personality, it more completely involves body, soul and spirit, is the most perfect form of union that human beings know. How strange, then, to argue that one may treat a lover as one would not treat a friend! Make one and lose one so lightly, and disavow all the responsibility of a love in which so much is given, so much involved! It is true that all human love has a physical element, even if it is only the desire for the physical presence of the beloved one. We all want sometimes to see and to touch our friends. But in s.e.x-love that physical element becomes a desire for perfect union, expressing a spiritual harmony. Can one take such a gift lightly, and pa.s.s from one relations.h.i.+p to another with a readiness which would seem contemptible in a friend?

It is this holding of human personality cheap that is really immoral, really dishonest: for it is not cheap. It is this which makes prost.i.tution a horror, and prost.i.tutes the Ishmaels of their race. They "sell cheap what is most dear," and, knowing this, rage against their buyers. The hideously demoralizing effect of a life of prost.i.tution on the soul is a commonplace.

"These women," it has been said, "sink so low that they cease to know what love is, they cease to be able to give. They can only cheat and steal and sell." It is true. Whatever virtues of kindliness and pity the prost.i.tute may (and often does) have for other unfortunates and outcasts, her att.i.tude in general does become that of the parasite, the swindler, the vampire.

Why? Because on her the deepest outrage against human personality is committed. Without a shadow of claim, without a pretence of offering its equivalent, that, in her, is bought and sold which is beyond price. Why should she not cheat and thieve? Take all she can, she cannot get the true value of what has been bought from her. Does she reason all that out? More often than we think. But whether she reasons consciously or not, she knows she has been defrauded: and she defrauds.

But it is the buying and selling, I shall be told, that makes her so vile: between such a sale and the free gift of lovers lies the whole difference between morality and immorality. I do not think so. It is the contemptuous use of another which is immoral, and though actually to buy and sell the person is the lowest depth of immorality, because it is the lowest and most brutal expression of such contempt, any lightness or irreverence is "immoral" in its degree; so therefore is conduct which makes love an evanescent thing, or the giving of personality which love involves, a pa.s.sing emotion.

If we feel this to be so in friends.h.i.+p, surely it is more and not less true of a union so complete on every plane as that of s.e.x. Can you take that--and give it--and pa.s.s on, as though it were a light thing?

The desire for permanence, for stability, for trustworthiness lies very deep in human nature. We may--we do--rebel against it, and speak with rapture of an unfettered existence without material ties: but even in material things the nomad is the least creative, the least civilized of his kind. His existence is neither so picturesque nor so human as we imagine.

One has only to read history to see how little he has contributed to humanity--and how little he has helped to raise the human level above the animal. It is not for nothing that we find the home imposed upon human kind by the necessities of human infancy. It is the helplessness of the child that has humanized our species by creating the home which its helplessness demanded, and though a great deal that is sentimental is said about homes, this remains a fact. The nomadic, the homeless race gives little to the world; it is by nature and circ.u.mstances an exploiter of resources for which it feels no responsibility, from which it is content to take without giving. Reading in a pamphlet of Professor Toynbee's the other day, I found this description of the Eastern world in the 15th and 16th centuries of our era:--"Even when the East began to recover and comparatively stable Moslem states arose again in Turkey and Persia and Hindustan, _the nomadic taint was in them and condemned them to sterility_.... One gets the impression not of a government administering a country, but of _a horde of nomads exploiting it_."[B]

[Footnote B: The italics are mine.--A.M.R.]

Even so is it with human love. These nomads of the affections give and take so little as they pa.s.s from hand to hand that they become cheap and have little left to give at last: nor do they really get what they would take.

Men and women claim the right to "experience," but experience of what? We do not live by bread alone, and the physical experience is not really all we seek. It is something, however? Yes--certainly something: but by a paradox familiar enough in human affairs, to s.n.a.t.c.h the lesser is to sacrifice the greater. The experimental lover, the giver whose small and careful gift is for a time, claims in the name of "experience," of the "fulfilment of his nature," what really belongs only to a greater giving.

Such lovers are like a rich man who sets out tramping with nothing in his pocket. He may suffer temporary inconvenience, but is within safe distance of his banking account. He plays with a risk he can never really know, since knowledge and experience are not for those "whose sails were never to the tempest given." The prudent lover whose love is lightly given for as long as it lasts is as wise--and as futile.

I think, too, that those who offer this little price for so great a thing have nothing left at last. To taste love, to _use_ the great pa.s.sion of s.e.x is on a par with the exploitation of genius on a series of "pot-boilers."

Genius may outlast a few such meannesses, but they will murder it at last, and the man who by pot-boiling has gained the opportunity to create a real work of art finds there is no more art left in him. He has now the leisure, the opportunity, the public: but not the power. So is it with those who lightly use so great a thing as s.e.x. Yielded to every impulse, given to each "new-hatched, unfledged companion," it loses its capacity for greatness, and the experience desired pa.s.ses for ever from the grasp.

It is this which, to my mind, rules out the "experimental marriage."

Much may be said for it--and has been, and is being said by people whose judgment must command respect. But love is impatient of lending. If it is not given outright in the belief that the gift is final, can the "experiment" be valid? Is not this very sense of finality--this desire to give and burn one's s.h.i.+ps--of the very essence of love? One cannot experiment in finality.

It is true that many marriages would not have taken place, and had much better not have taken place, if there had been greater knowledge: but we have yet to learn what greater knowledge can do even without experiment.

Hitherto we have gone to the opposite extreme and buried all that belongs to s.e.x not in a fog of ignorance only, but under a mountain of hypocrisy and lies. Let in the light, and see if we cannot do better! And though it is true that some things cannot be known by any amount of teaching, and wait upon experience, yet I submit that the essential experience is realized only when it is believed to be the expression of an undying love--a gift and not a loan.

Let me say one last word on the solution to our moral difficulties proposed by those who affirm for every woman "the right to motherhood." This claim is based on the belief that the creative impulse is more, or more consciously, present in the s.e.xual nature of a woman than of a man, and that, in consequence, the satisfaction of that impulse is to a great extent the satisfaction of a need which makes the disproportionate number of women in any country a real tragedy. It is impossible to generalize with any degree of confidence about the s.e.xual nature of either man or woman in our present state of crude and barbarous ignorance; but I am inclined--very tentatively--to agree that this generalization is correct, and that the creative impulse is an even stronger factor in the s.e.xual life of women than of men. I realize the cruelty of a civilization in which war and its accessories create an artificial excess of women over men, and in consequence deprive hundreds of thousands of women of motherhood. I do not think I underestimate that cruelty or its tragic consequences. I admit the "right" of women to the exercise of their vocation and the fulfilment of their nature.

But I affirm that those who base upon this claim the right to bring children into the world, where society has made marriage impossible, are not moved to do so by the instinct of motherhood. No, no, for motherhood is more than a physical act; it is a spiritual power. Its first thought is not for the right of the mother but of the child. And what are a child's rights? A home--two parents--all that makes complete the spiritual as well as the material meaning of "home." I do not believe that there is any woman who is the mother of young children, and a widow, who does not daily realize how irreparable is the loss sustained by the fatherless. War perhaps has inflicted that loss upon them; it is one of the iniquities of war. And though the mother tries all she can--yes, and works miracles of love to make herself all she _can_ be to her child, that loss cannot wholly be made up. I speak with intensity of conviction on this point, for I have myself a little adopted child--orphaned of both parents--in my home. I never see other children with their parents without realizing what she has lost not only in her mother but her father. There is needed the different point of view, the different relations.h.i.+p, bringing with it a fuller and a richer experience of life. What woman that hast lost her husband does not realize the truth of what I say?

It is beside the mark to say that a bad father is worse than no father, or that accident may take the father even from happily circ.u.mstanced homes.

This is true. But a woman does not deliberately _choose_ a bad father for her children, or _choose_ that he shall be taken away from them by death.

It is the deliberate infliction beforehand of this great loss upon a child that seems to me the very negation of that motherhood in whose name this "right" is enforced. And for what purpose is a child to be brought into the world under conditions so imperfect? To "fulfil the nature" of its mother; to complete her experience; to meet her need. Is there any mockery of motherhood more complete than this sacrifice of the child to the mother?

Why, our physical nature itself is less selfis.h.!.+ When a woman conceives, her child receives _first_ all the nourishment it needs; whatever it does not demand, the mother has. A woman herself undernourished can, if the process has not gone too far, bear a well-nourished and a healthy child, because she has given all to that child. It is the epitome of motherhood!

And now it is affirmed that a woman, to satisfy her own need, has a right to bring into the world a child on whom she--its mother--has deliberately inflicted a grave disadvantage. I do not speak of such lesser disadvantages as may be involved in illegitimacy. I trust the time is at hand when we shall cease to brand any child as "illegitimate" or despise one for another's defect. But though children are never illegitimate, parents may be so; and none more than the woman who sacrifices her child to herself.

For this disadvantage is not a mere cruelty of society which may be "civilized" away; it is inherent in the case. A child should have a father and a mother and a home.

It is no defence to say that the unmarried mother proposes to give her child a better home than many a child of married parents has. If her concern is for the child, there are, alas! only too many waifs already in the world to whom such a home, though imperfect, would be a paradise to what it has. Real motherhood could and often does rescue such children with joy. That so few children are adopted in a world of women clamouring for motherhood proves the essential selfishness of the claim. It is not the child--it is herself--that the woman who demands motherhood as a "right" is concerned with. What an irony! For to satisfy herself first is the negation of motherhood.

We have heard much of late years--and rightly--of the exploitation of women by men. Let us not celebrate our growing enfranchis.e.m.e.nt by becoming ourselves the exploiters; and that, not of men, but of babes.

IV

THE TRUE BASIS OF MORALITY

"Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O no! it is an ever fixed mark That looks on tempests, and is never shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compa.s.s come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out ev'n to the edge of doom:-- If this be error, and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved."

W. Shakespeare.

"He that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body.

What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of G.o.d, and ye are not your own?" (I. Cor. vi., 18-19.)

I said in an earlier chapter that I wanted to find a moral standard which should be based on the realities of human nature, and in order to do that we must first have a clear idea of what human nature really is, and by what law it lives. We have been pa.s.sing during the last generation from an idea of law which belonged to our forefathers to a new idea of law which has been given to us by modern science; and in transition we still talk in ambiguous terms about "law"--moral "law," for instance--confusing ourselves between a law that is imposed on us from outside, a law that is pa.s.sed by Parliament, for instance, or a law that has been the common custom of the country through its judges, and that kind of "law" which science has revealed to us. Scientific "law" is not imposed from without; it is the law of our being. When you talk of the "law" of gravitation, you do not mean that somebody outside has laid it down that ma.s.s shall act in a certain way with regard to other ma.s.ses; you mean that ma.s.s-material--being what it is--behaves in a certain way. That is to say, a scientific law is _the law of being_ of that which obeys the law. It obeys it because it is its nature to do so. If we could get a firm, hold of that idea of law, our own legislation would not be so senseless as it often is; for we should try to discover what is the nature of human beings--their real nature, about which we are often deceived--and we should try to make our laws, including our moral laws, those to which human nature, at its best, would most naturally and fully respond. That is the conception that is at the back of the great phrase which sounds like a paradox in one of the Collects of the English Prayer Book: "Whose service is perfect freedom." "Whose service is perfect freedom"; that is to say, when you obey G.o.d, you find perfect freedom because you are doing what it is your true nature to do. And that is why I want to base our moral law, our moral standard, on the realities of human nature. But, you will reply, when people are free to act as they choose they sometimes choose to violate their own nature. I cannot say how that happens; it involves the entire problem of evil; and I do not propose even to attempt to deal with it in this book. I will only say that our confusion has arisen, as I think, out of the very fact that instead of obeying the law of our being we have violated it; and now are so confused that we hardly know what "human nature" really is, or of what it is capable. That is why we get such extraordinarily different ideas about morals, and why, as I think, we get such arbitrary judgments on human beings.

Before, then, we can rightly establish our moral standard we have to decide what human nature really is, and when we have done that we shall know what is really moral. I suppose that sounds like a paradox to many, because they think that morality is always "going against" human nature. If people do anything that is generally called "immoral," they will excuse themselves on the grounds of human nature; they will say: "After all, _human nature being what it is_, you must expect this, that and the other kind of licence and immorality"; and to say that morality, real morality, can only be based on the realities of human nature will therefore sound to many of you the wildest kind of paradox. But I want to pursue it just as though it were true, because I believe it is true.

What, then, are the realities of our nature? Here is one: a human being is not and never can be cut off from other human beings. He is not alone. He cannot consider himself only. If he does so he violates his own nature, because it is not his nature to be alone, and he cannot act without his actions affecting other people. He cannot think, he cannot feel, he cannot act or speak without affecting other people, and it is futile for anyone to say: "It does not matter to others what I do; n.o.body knows; it concerns only myself." Your innermost thought affects the whole world in which you live, and whatever moral standard you are going to adopt, you must take it for granted that your standard will affect other people, and that it is absolutely impossible for you to act or think alone.

And then human beings are three-fold in nature. They have a body, a mind--or what St. Paul calls a "soul"--and a spirit. "Soul" is a word whose meaning we have altered so much that I must define what I mean by it and what I think St. Paul meant by it. The soul includes the emotions and the intellect, that part of a man which is not wholly physical and which is not entirely spiritual. Everyone has a soul. And every one of you, however much you ignore your body, however much you may tell me your body does not really exist, have got a body too. You have to eat and drink and sleep, just like the most material alderman, though you may eat less. And you cannot base a real moral standard on the pretence that you have not got a body. You are, on one side of your nature, physical, material, animal; but you have got a mind and emotions or "soul"; and you have got a spirit. To act as though you had not is just as futile as to pretend that you have not got a body. "Where there is no vision the people perish." "Mankind is incurably religious." "All the world seeks after G.o.d." Those proverbs, those sayings, which are familiar to all, crystallize the world's experience that human beings are spiritual beings. If there is any person who thinks that he is merely an intellect and a body, I will direct the attention of that intellect of his away from himself to the race, and I will remind him that practically no race in the world has ever been entirely without the sense of G.o.d; that, however hard men try, they have never been able to cure humanity of its spiritual hunger; that though our G.o.ds are often gross and earthy, even diabolical, yet they are spiritual, and they are the proof that man is spiritually aware; that he is a spirit as well as a body and a soul. Now I say that anyone who tries to base his morality on the a.s.sumption that he is only a body, or only an intelligence, or only a spirit, has got a false standard, and his morality is a dishonest kind of morality. The body will avenge itself on those who ignore it.

Psychologists are teaching us that the mind will avenge itself on those who ignore it. And this is just as true of the spirit. Where there is no vision the people do perish. Your spiritual nature avenges itself on those who try to rule it out. Base your morality either on the exclusion of any part of your being, or on the a.s.sumption that what you do concerns yourself alone; and you will find that you are violating human nature. It is useless for you to act wrongly and to affirm that you do it "because human nature is what it is." When you do so, you are a.s.suming that human nature is _not_ what it is; that is to say you a.s.sume that it is purely physical, when, in fact, it is three-fold--body, soul and spirit. You can see for yourselves, I think, how this violation of human nature works itself out. For animals promiscuity is not wrong. When they treat themselves as purely animals they are basing their moral standard, if I may put it so, on bed-rock; they _are_ animals, and therefore they behave as animals without violating any law of their being. As they rise higher in the scale of evolution their morals become n.o.bler. There are moral standards among the lower animals, but they remain at a certain level, and rightly so. No animal is harmed by behaving like an animal, for in doing so he obeys the law of his being; but if human beings behave as though they were animals, what happens? They find to their horror that they have let loose upon the world detestable, hideous and devastating diseases. Do you think that medicine will ever be able to rid the world of what are called the diseases of immorality as long as immorality remains? I do not believe it. I know that you can do much for individual sufferers, though you cannot do one-tenth part of what doctors thought they were going to be able to do, eight or nine years ago. And, of course, whatever we can do, we must and ought to do. But we do not reach the root of the matter by medicine.

No scientist can tell us how small-pox or tuberculosis or rheumatism first entered the world; but any scientist can tell us that by wrong living, wrong housing, wrong feeding, we can breed and spread and perpetuate disease. In other words, we are diseased not because we obey the laws of our nature but because we violate them: and though we can take the individual sufferer and (sometimes) cure him, we shall not get rid of the disease until we have learnt to obey those laws and to live rightly.

In just the same way the diseases of vice, though no one can say how they first came into the world, continue and flourish, not because of human nature, but because we violate some law of our own nature in what we do. We may even cure the individual; we may see a thousand struck and a thousand guilty escape; the fact remains that these diseases are bred in the swamp of immorality, just as certainly as malaria is bred in the mosquito-haunted pools of the malaria swamp. Drain the swamp, and you get rid of the malaria, for there is no longer any place for the malaria-bearing mosquito to breed. Drain the swamp of immorality, and you get rid of venereal disease, because there is no longer a place where these diseases can breed.

Live rightly, and your nature will respond in health. When human beings elect to make their relations with one another promiscuous--when, that is to say, they treat themselves as animals--they are not obeying, they are violating the law of their own being; for they are not animals only, and to treat themselves as such is to disobey the law of their own nature. And disobedience reacts in disease.

So again, the relations of men and women are of the mind as well as of the body and the spirit. You cannot rule out your mind, and I think that those who believe, as many do today, not indeed in a merely animal promiscuity, but in rather casual relations between men and women--experiments, if you like, men and women pa.s.sing from one union to another--rule out the fact that a human being has a mind, a memory and foresight; that our being includes a past, and, in a sense, includes a future also; and when you try to divorce your physical experience from your intellectual and emotional being you are again violating the law of your own nature.

I remember asking one of the most happily married women that I know to put into words, if she could, the reason why she believed that married people, married lovers, should not have gone through other relations.h.i.+ps with other people before they gave themselves to one another. I asked her to express in words what seemed to her immoral. She wrote this: "In the ideal union between G.o.d and man, we know that man must give the fulness of his being, body, mind and spirit, throughout his whole life, to G.o.d, and that anything less than this, though it may be fine and n.o.ble, does fall short of perfection. It is the same with the human love of men and women. The 'fulness of our being' which we desire to give to our lover consists not only in what we are at any given moment but in what we have been in the past, what we may become in the future. And so in the formation of merely temporary unions the highest and deepest unity can never be fully achieved." She went on to say: "When we have pa.s.sed beyond the physical sphere we shall be able, like G.o.d, to give ourselves equally to all; but while we are in the flesh we cannot share ourselves equally with all, and any attempt to do so lowers the standard of perfect human love." I like that, because it is based again on a loyal acceptance of human nature. We are not yet as G.o.d in the sense that, being wholly spirit, we can share ourselves equally with all. We do still live in bodies, and we have in this life memory and prevision, and surely that is indeed an ideal union, if we are looking for the highest, which is able to give its past and its future as well as its present, so that the whole personality is involved, in that act of union, and that anything short of that is at least not quite perfect. Human beings are still in the body, and are yet soul and spirit in that body, and must take both into account. Divorce the physical from the spiritual in yourself, and you are violating yourself. Divorce the physical from the spiritual in someone else--you who perhaps say: "I myself love such a man, such a woman, with the best part of myself; what I do with another is of no importance"--you violate the nature of that other from whom you take what is physical, and leave what is spiritual as though it were not there.

Your life, like your body, is too highly organized, too sensitive, too knit together by memories and prevision for you to leave behind you anything that has really entered into your life. It is a shoddy and superficial nature that pa.s.ses easily from experience to experience, and when you look at such you can see how shallower still it becomes. It is the deeper and the loftier nature that cannot enter into any human relations.h.i.+p and then pa.s.s away from it altogether unchanged. And even that shoddy, that poor, that mean little soul which seems to pa.s.s so lightly from one experience to another does not really altogether escape. Some mark is left upon the soul, some a.s.sociation remains in the memory; and again and again marriages have been wrecked because a man has taken the a.s.sociations of the gutter into the sanctuary of his home. Unwillingly, with an imagination that fain would reject the stain, he has injured, he has insulted the love that has now come to him, the most precious thing on earth, because he has not known how to do otherwise; because all the a.s.sociations of pa.s.sion have been to him degraded, smirched, treated frivolously in the past. It is true of men; it is also true of women. I do not know of anything that makes understanding harder between two people than the fact that one has had experiences and a.s.sociations which the other has not had and does not understand, because they are on an entirely different level. These create between them, with all the desire for understanding in the world, a barrier of misunderstanding and incomprehension, which is all the more fatal because it is so intangible, so obscure, so hard to put into words, so often actually unconscious or subconscious in the mind of one or of the other.

Again, you must not think that you are altogether spirit, and here perhaps it is the woman who is more apt to sin than the man. How often have I talked to women who speak of the physical side of love as though it were something base and unworthy! Such a conception of pa.s.sion is inhuman, and therefore it is not really moral. A woman who thinks of this sacrament of love, for which perhaps the man who loves her has kept himself clean all his life, as a base thing, and who treats it as though it were a concession to something base in a man's nature, instead of being the very consecration of body and soul at once, the sacrament of union, one of the loveliest things in human nature--such a woman gives as great a shock to what is sacred and lovely in her husband's nature as he when he brings with him into his marriage the a.s.sociations of the street. It is as hard, it is as insulting, it makes marriage as difficult in understanding, one way as the other. For it is not true that our bodies are vile and base; they are the temples of the Holy Spirit.

Or if you think that you can stand alone, that what you do is the concern of no one else, that your life is a solitary thing, so solitary that no man or woman is concerned, no one but yourself, and you may sin alone--there again you misunderstand. You cannot stand alone, and nothing that you say or think or do leaves the world unchanged. Is that difficult to believe in these days, when psychology is teaching us how all-important thought is?

Ought you to find it hard to believe that what you do in the utmost secrecy affects others, since it affects you, and no man lives to himself alone?

I do not wish to exaggerate. I have a horror of those books and people who speak in exaggerated terms of any kind of s.e.xual lapse. I am persuaded that human beings can rise from such mistakes, and rise much more easily than from the subtler spiritual sins which have so much more respectable an air.

But yet do not sin under the impression that what you do concerns yourself alone. Do not use, for your own satisfaction only, powers which were given you for creation and for the world.

But this, you may say, is not the accepted standard of morality. That is a matter rather of laws and ceremonies. And people begin to ask; "What real difference can a mere ceremony make?" It does not make any difference to the morality of your relations.h.i.+ps with your fellow men and women. Nothing that is immoral becomes moral because it has been done under a legal contract, or consecrated by a rite. There, I think, is where the world has gone so wrong. The idea that a relation that is selfish, cruel, mercenary, becomes moral because someone has said some words over you, and you have signed a register--what a farcical idea! How on earth does that change anything at all? The morality of all civil or religious ceremony lies, I think, in this--that by accepting and going through it, you accept the fact that your love does concern others besides yourself; it will concern your children; and beyond that, it concerns the world. You are right when you ask your friends to come and rejoice with you at your wedding. It is the concern of all the world when people love each other, and it is the failure of _love_ that concerns them when marriage is a failure. Such failure chills the atmosphere; it shakes our faith in love as the supreme power in the universe; it makes us all waver in our allegiance to constancy and love when love fails. It is a joyful thing when people love. "All the world loves a lover." It is an old saying, but what a true one! It _is_ our concern when people n.o.bly and loyally love each other, it is the concern of the community, and those who take upon themselves these public vows seem to me to have a more truly moral conception of love than those who say: "This is our affair only; it is not the affair of the State or the affair of the Church." But the actual ceremony must be the expression of a moral feeling such as that. It cannot in itself make moral what is immoral! The old idea that if a woman was seduced by a man she was "made honest" by the man marrying her is essentially immoral. Very likely all that she knew about the man was that she could not trust him, and to suppose that we can set right what is wrong by tying them together for the rest of their lives is to imagine an absurdity and to establish a lie.