“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 compass 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 God, 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 passing 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 passed 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 mass shall act in a certain way with regard to other masses; you mean that mass-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 God, 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