Part 3 (1/2)

With regard to the working moral standard of society there is just this to be said, that if the Christian standard be the true one then our aim must be nothing less than a condition in which public opinion shall in all things endorse the latter. To-day the social standard is lax when the Christian one is strict, and cruel when the Christian is generous and forgiving. In saying this I am of course thinking of the _true_ Christian standard. There is a conventional Christian standard which is more cruel and unforgiving than society's standard. But it is really definitely unchristian. Further, society is radically insincere, forgiving what can be kept secret, condoning on account of moral skepticism much general laxity, and yet breaking out into a mock moral indignation before discovered vice.

We are all in great danger in this connection on account of the mysterious force of the herd instinct. We tend to accept what others think just because they think it. We live under the power of convention often without realizing how insincere and hollow convention may be.

Wherefore if we are ever to make progress it becomes nothing less than a duty to scrutinize current standards. They may be less than Christian, and if we are ever to make progress it can only come through an honest process of inquiry and revision.

_The Reasons for the Christian Standard_

To-day the spirit of inquiry and challenge is definitely demanding the reasons for the Christian standard itself. But I have no complaint to offer on that account. I believe only good can come from it in the end.

I believe the stored wisdom of the ages is embodied in that Christian standard, and that the more we know about s.e.x the more clearly do we perceive that that standard points the way, and the only way, to real happiness for men and women in social relations, and to the attainment of our highest life. But I freely acknowledge the right of the rising generation to demand the reasons for this standard. I propose, therefore, to try to state those reasons on the a.s.sumption that I am addressing honest and sincere minds who only want to know the truth. I can only work out the answer bit by bit.

To begin with, ”Why is self-abuse wrong?” It comes under the head of incontinence, which the Bible and all serious moral teachers so firmly condemn. But why? Doctors are beginning to say that unless it is excessive it does no particular harm either to the brain or the body.

Its victims worry about it--But need they? Here at least the answer is easily found because it is supplied by those, and by all of those, who indulge in the practice. I have never met a man who did not despise himself for it. It invariably leaves a man out of conceit with himself.

I have heard men stoutly defending irregular relations with women, but I have never heard this practice defended, even though it is exceedingly common. Robust male sentiment is all against it. And the reason is that, because it is an attempt to satisfy s.e.xual craving in an abnormal way, it always leaves psychic disturbance behind it. It may relieve a physical tension, but it does nothing to satisfy the whole man. It leaves a bad taste in the mind. Both mind and spirit as well as the body enter into true s.e.xual experience. They have no place in this, and by reason of it the inner harmonies of a man's nature are inevitably jangled.

I have noticed, too, a further and very serious consequence of this habit. It plants deep in many men's minds, and especially in the minds of sensitive and intellectual men, an abhorrence for the s.e.xual side of themselves. Just because they have never achieved freedom from them, they hate and despise the pa.s.sions that overcome them. This often leads to very serious consequences when love enters into their lives. They want then to dissociate love from all its physical concomitants. They regard all things s.e.xual as impure. It may even come to them as a shock to find out that the women they love are capable of pa.s.sion, and they resent any bodily effects of their own love. And this may almost spell calamity unless psychological adjustment is achieved in time. For true marriage _must_ involve a clean and happy acceptance of the s.e.xual facts. A man must bring a clean mind to the whole of his common life with the woman he loves, and self-abuse is ultimately a serious evil just because it defiles the mind.

Then, secondly, why are wild oats evil things to sow? Why should we not endorse the shrug of the shoulders with which society treats them? I notice that even women lightly forgive them, and I believe they make a mistake. Forgiveness is indeed always a divine operation, but light forgiveness implies that nothing serious has happened. What then is so serious about licentiousness?

I must of necessity discriminate at this point. By wildness men often mean occasional intimacies into which they do not pretend to be led by love. About such experiences I suppose men would say that they amount merely to the satisfaction of a physical appet.i.te, and that after they are over a man may go his way as little affected as is a man who has satisfied his thirst.

But that is not the truth about them. The man in such cases suffers damage. He suffers it because he has attempted an impossibility. He has tried to separate the various parts of his being, and to satisfy his animal nature without any consideration for his mind and heart. But s.e.xual experience itself proves that that cannot be done. The s.e.xual instinct is intimately related to our whole beings, but especially to our affections. At the moment of s.e.xual intimacy a man at least pretends for the moment that he loves, and when he offers that pretence to someone whom in reality he despises and means to leave in an hour, he does violence to his whole nature. The soul of him insists all the time that this is a low business. His outraged mind and heart protest and produce an evil after-taste. No man likes to remember such events.

The best of him could not enter into them. He is left jangled and upset. All that makes such doings seem right at any time is that when it has reached a certain degree of intensity pa.s.sion seems to justify its own demands. That is the age-long illusion whereby evil deceives and betrays us. But till we have learnt to repudiate that suggestion we are not even on the way to succeed in this part of life. Often the men who defend such indulgences admit that they are gross, and then fall back upon the contention that a man _must_ be gross at times--that his nature demands it. It is a fairly serious slander to offer to our s.e.x. Fortunately there exist thousands of incarnate proofs that it is _only_ a slander. We all know that his s.e.xual nature sets the ordinary healthy man a very serious problem, and about that I have tried to speak with sympathy and charity in a later chapter. But the a.s.sertion that a man _must_ be gross is hard to hear with patience. It is one of the lies that savor of cowardice.

By ”wildness,” however, men sometimes mean temporary intimate relations between men and women to which they _are_ led by love, and such relations.h.i.+ps are at least very different in moral quality from the gross ones I have spoken of.

Why must they be condemned? My whole contention is that love and love alone makes physical intimacy pure and right. Why then cannot love sanctify pa.s.sionate relations.h.i.+ps outside marriage? Why should the union of true lovers be held to be impure before marriage and pure after it?

Let me answer the last query first. I do not think the union of true lovers apart from marriage is impure. I believe that such lovers make a very serious mistake--a mistake that may turn out to have been cruel. I believe that society is utterly right in condemning such unions, and that those who really understand will always refuse to enter on them.

But impure is not the word to apply to them. They are clean and beautiful compared to the bodily intimacies of those who marry without love. And yet I do not think that even emotionally they can ever be perfect. s.e.xual intimacy is not the perfect and sacramental thing which it is meant to be unless both parties come to it with free and untroubled minds, feeling that what they do is a right and happy thing.

But in the unions of unmarried persons there generally lurks some half-hidden sense of shame. Some part of the being of one or the other really endorses society's standards, and even love cannot dispel the shadows thus created.

And yet still that does not meet the challenge to show the _reason_ for society's standard. The reasons are really many. In the first place, if unmarried lovers take steps to prevent their intimacy from having its due fruit in a child, they are robbing their experience of its fine spontaneity, and introducing an element of calculation and caution into what should be a thing unbound. While, on the other hand, if they do not prevent the coming of a child they are, in the present state of society, doing a definite and cruel wrong to their own offspring. To love a child dearly and to know that by your own act you have handicapped it in life from the first must be a bitter experience indeed. I am well aware that law in regard to illegitimate children is unchristian. Even more is the att.i.tude of society to them unchristian.

But so long as things remain as they are, the parents of an illegitimate child do it a wrong. Further, even though law and custom should alter, it would still be true that a child without both its own parents is seriously handicapped in life. Which leads on to my next point; for, secondly, if two lovers really love, they want to give their whole selves to one another, including their whole futures. No man truly and loyally loves a woman who wants to keep open a loophole of escape from her. It would be well if women would always apply this test to the pa.s.sionate protestations of men. Real love is love without reserve. True s.e.xual intimacy in itself means taking each other for better or for worse, and when lovers unite themselves though still unwilling for such permanent unions, their love is not perfect. They are not really united by love. They are letting mere present desire carry them away. I hear of many men, and even of some women, who ask why they should not have many lovers if they have many friends. The answer is that no man gives his whole self to a friend, but that love, when it is real, does mean the giving of your whole self. And that, plainly, a man can only do to one woman and a woman to one man.

It is generally in defense of temporary unions that people question the necessity for marriage vows. But temporary unions cannot be ended happily. If they were entered on without love, they are gross things, as I have already said; and if they were the creation of real love, there is no happy way out of them. The two have been too close to one another to part without tearing apart--leaving ragged and it may be bleeding edges on their personalities. Then again, as I have tried to show already, love is only made perfect when it is allowed to issue in responsibilities and labors. Divorced from them it is a selfish thing.

There is a wild and lawless element in pa.s.sion, which is part of its glory. But that glory is only sweetened and justified for those who let their pa.s.sion carry them through the whole career of experience to which it summons them.

All this may be accepted as establis.h.i.+ng a case for permanent unions as the only legitimate things, but inasmuch as it claims that the demand for permanence lies in the very heart of love itself it may still be asked with some urgency, ”Why introduce a marriage ceremony with public vows?” And here I must follow a somewhat different line of thought which may at first sight seem contradictory. In spite of all that I have said, I believe that even ardent lovers are all the better for being bound, because of the wayward element of inconstancy in human nature. Thousands of married persons have never once been conscious of their vows. They have never come near thinking, ”We must hold together because we promised,” or ”We must make the best of things because we are tied together.” Thousands have never for a moment wanted to change their condition. But with others it is not so. No men or women are always at their best. Though they may have had moments on the heights when they gladly took each other for better or for worse, there will come other moods when the finer notes of love will not sound in their ears. There will come to all but a few couples hours when they will be irritated and annoyed with one another. And if they were free to do so, they might fling away from each other and so miss after all the best that was to be. For the best is not to be found in those early days when pa.s.sion flames and dominates, but rather in those later days when two personalities have at last become really fitted to each other and when the daily round of labor is illumined by the lamp of love. And therefore, being what we are, it is a good thing for our own sakes that we should be bound.

Even though the bonds should actually mean pain, it is still good that they should be allowed to bind, though it be only for the sake of the children. Pa.s.sionate lovers do not think of children, but society must needs put their claims before all others. Probably the historical reason why society came to insist on monogamy and to condemn all irregular unions lay in the fact that it is the inalienable right of a child to be brought up by a father and a mother, and that no society can be strong and finely ordered unless its foundations are laid in family life, wherein men and women co-operate to give the rising generation every possible chance.

I a.s.sume that I am addressing honest minds that wish to handle the issues of life sincerely and wisely, and to them I am sure it must be worth pointing out that it can never be right for individuals to order their lives on principles which could not be given a universal application. I can well understand a pa.s.sionate couple being quite sure that they will hold to one another throughout life, though they be in no way legally tied. I can imagine that many such couples would resent as a profanity the mere suggestion that they could ever want to part. But imagine what society would become if legal ties were abolished. You and your man or woman may be quite sure that you would never part, but you know that thousands would. Couples would set out on the joint life with little thought, and allow the first painful misunderstanding to part them. Many men would shake off their obligations almost as soon as they found they were becoming heavy. Both men and women would pa.s.s from one temporary union to another, mutilating their better natures in the process. Thousands of women would be left in helpless loneliness. Tens of thousands of children would go uncared for and neglected. The picture becomes more horrible the more carefully you look into its details. And as you look you begin to see the real value of our moral standard. It is not an instance of the fussiness of Mrs. Grundy. It is not an instance of slave morality imposed upon free people. It is not one of the arbitrary dicta of a tyrannical Church. It is rather the embodiment of the wisdom learnt through ages of varied and often tragic experience. It is an attempt to conserve for each rising generation the possibility of the best in the field of s.e.xual experience. It does point out the way of happy, healthy, and complete life.

I have left to the end a thought about the marriage ceremony which will only appeal to some, but which I feel ought to have a place in this chapter. Many fine and sensitive lovers shrink from the publicity of ordinary weddings. Their love is to them so sacred and so personal a thing that they do not want to make any parade of themselves before a great gathering of relations and friends. Well! I know of no binding reason why such sensitive couples should call in the relations and friends. Those relations and friends like to rejoice with those who rejoice, because of a very human and kindly interest. And many couples, and especially many brides, greatly enjoy their friends on their marriage day. If, however, a couple prefer a private wedding that is their affair. But about the place and value of a religious ceremony I do want to add a word. If a man and a woman realize that their love is a sacred thing, I believe they will find they actually want to make the great step into final intimacy in the presence of G.o.d, and to stop for a moment ere they go up into that mysterious country to ask His blessing and guidance. I have said that at a certain point love itself demands intimacy, and that it is an entirely natural thing for us to desire it. But none the less it _is_ a momentous hour in the life of any couple when they pa.s.s behind the last barriers and enter on a sacramental oneness of body. It is a wonderful hour--the hour of all others when the romance of life is most splendid. But just because it is that, and because the issues of that hour are so far-reaching, what could be more seemly than that they should pause for a moment on the threshold and ask the Giver of all love to bless and guide them!

To kneel first together before Him, and then to pa.s.s on--to acknowledge His goodness as the author of love, and then to go up on to love's high places, what could be more just to the real facts! I know not with what solemnities those who do _not_ believe in G.o.d are going to dignify that hour in life, but to all young men and women who _do_ believe in G.o.d, I would like to say with all possible urgency: Be sure you do not take that great step until you can ask G.o.d's blessing on the taking of it.