But there is another possibility.  You can repress, and God knows how many boys and young men, how many young women and girls have struggled to do so, and are trying to do so to-day, with a sense always of guilt and shame in their minds, laying up mental difficulties for themselves, the psychologists tell us, by this repression.  You know the type; you know the kind of person who becomes hard and narrow and uncomprehending.  That is one type.  You can read it in their faces.  The pinched look, the cramped mentality reflects itself in the body and in the face.  And then there is the other type, those who have rejected this attitude towards life, denying that there is anything to be ashamed of in the natural impulse of their sex, or cause for regret if they give rein to that whose repression does so much harm, who frankly fling away the idea of self-control, because repression has seemed such a disastrous method of self-control.  You can see it in their faces also; in the gradual demoralization of their nature.  The rake on one hand, the prude on the other, represent the ultimate consequence of the process I am trying to describe.  Many people have marked on their souls, if not on their faces, one or other of these ways of life.  They have not, perhaps, gone far, they may have gone but a little way in one direction or the other; but the mark on the soul remains all the same.  And when you see the extreme result, the prude on one side, the rake on the other, do you not begin to desire a better way?  To ask yourself whether there is not a third choice before you?

I believe there is; and the choice is this:  It is neither the repression nor the degradation, but transformation of the sex side of our nature.  I will take as the supreme example of that transformation the figure of Christ Himself—­Christ who had neither wife nor child—­St. Francis of Assisi, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Theresa of Spain.  Four of the greatest figures—­One of them supreme—­who were not “natural celibates” in the sense that implies that they did not have surging through them the divine impulse of creative love; for these are the greatest lovers the world has ever seen, and compared with theirs even the great love of one man for one woman, one woman for one man, is the lesser thing.  But these great figures in human history are those on whose hearts Humanity itself made such a claim that it became impossible for them to give to one what was claimed by all the world.  You will see that this is not a denial of creative love, for no one in the world has so loved the world as these.  They are the beacons of humanity in this matter of love, and how are they, shall we say, how are they not fathers and mothers, whose spiritual children are all over the world?  Have they not born into the world with travail of soul, the souls of men and women?  These great Lovers of Humanity were not lacking in passion; had they been they could not have moved the world; but their passion was transmuted