And I begin by calling your attention to the morality of Jesus of Nazareth, not because He is divine, but because He was a great master of the human heart, and more than others “knew what was in man.”

You will notice at once the height of His morality—­the depth of His mercy.  He demands such purity of spirit, such loyalty of heart, that the most loyal of His disciples shrank appalled:  “Whosoever shall look upon a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.” ...  “Whosoever shall put away his wife and marry another, committeth adultery against her.”  From such a standard Christ’s disciples shrank—­“If the case of the man be so with his wife, it is not good to marry.”  And one evangelist almost certainly inserted in this absolute prohibition the exception—­“Saving for the cause of fornication”—­feeling that the Master could not have meant anything else.  But, in fact, there is little doubt that Jesus did both say and mean that marriage demanded lifelong fidelity on either side; just as He really taught that a lustful thought was adultery in the sight of God.

But if Christendom has been staggered at the austerity of Christ’s morality not less has it been shocked at the quality of His mercy.  His gentleness to the sensual sinner has been compared, with amazement, to the sternness of His attitude to the sins of the spirit.  Not the profligate or the harlot but the Pharisee and the scribe were those who provoked His sternest rebukes.  And perhaps the most characteristic of all His dealings with such matters was that incident of the woman taken in adultery, when He at once reaffirmed the need of absolute chastity for men—­demand undreamed of by the woman’s accusers—­and put aside the right to condemn which in all that assembly He alone could claim—­“Neither do I condemn thee; go, and sin no more.”

Having then in mind this most lofty and compassionate of moralists, let us turn to the problem of to-day.  Here are nearly 2,000,000 women who, if the austere demands of faithful monogamy are to be obeyed, will never know the satisfaction of a certain physical need.  Now it is the desire of every normal human being to satisfy all his instincts.  And this is as true of women as of men.  What I have to say applies indeed to many men to-day, for many men are unable to marry because they have been so broken by war—­or otherwise—­so shattered or maimed or impoverished that they do not feel justified in marrying.  But I want to emphasize with all my power that the hardness of enforced celibacy presses as cruelly on women as on men.  Women, difficult as some people find it to believe, are human beings; and because women are so, they want work, and interest, and love—­both given and received—­and children, and, in short, the satisfaction of every human need.  The idea that existence is enough for them—­that they need not work, and do not suffer if their sex instincts are repressed