to the service of Humanity itself, for nothing else was great or wide enough for such a love.  Does anyone suppose that it was a mere instinct of asceticism that drove St. Francis to make out of snow, cold images of wife and child?  Was it not rather the sudden resurgent desire of the greatest of the saints for some more humanly warm affection, something more individual, something that nestles more closely to the heart, than this great service of Humanity?  And in a savage irony he mocks his pain.  “There are thy children, there is thy wife,” says St. Francis, and his cry is not the answer of the spirit to a lustful temptation:  it was the cry of a lonely human heart for the human happiness of wife and children and home.  Aye, and I would claim that Our Lord Himself had this desire.  For I cannot doubt that in that glorious young manhood of His, so full of power and sympathy and love, this agony of longing sometimes swept over Him.  He whose vitality and power were such that He hardly knew fatigue, who was so close a friend, so much loved and sought by women, so tender to little children, so young, so strong—­is it not certain that He was indeed “tempted in all things like as we are”?  How could one so physically vital, so humanly and divinely full of love, escape the conflict?  That He conquered we know; that He suffered we cannot doubt.  All His perfect humanity speaks to us in that lonely cry:  “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay His head.”  Do not dream, those of you who may have to struggle with your own nature, do not dream that Christ has not been there with you, that He had nothing to feel or to suffer.  How would He have developed that spiritual power, how would He have become so great a Lover of the world if He knew nothing of that side of life?  But He, and His greatest followers—­St. Francis of Assisi, St. Catherine and St. Theresa, and countless others who have followed them—­learned to transmute that great creative force, disdained both choices which I set before you, finding a nobler and more glorious way.  These would neither repress this great impulse, nor dissipate it, but so used it for the service of man that there is in all the history of man no life more rich, more human, more full of love, more full of creation, or more full of power, than the lives of these celibate men and women, who learned from Christ how they could live and love.

It is not easy for men and women this way, but it is possible.  It is possible, and it is glorious; and, in its degree, the need for it comes to everyone.  Do not imagine that it is not needed in marriage as well as out of marriage.  Every married lover will tell you that if his love is to remain what it was in the beginning—­if it is rather to grow in power and beauty—­he also must be able gradually to transmute his love in such a way that the spirit dominates the flesh more and more, and that the physical side of marriage becomes simply