Again, you must not think that you are altogether spirit, and here perhaps it is the woman who is more apt to sin than the man.  How often have I talked to women who speak of the physical side of love as though it were something base and unworthy!  Such a conception of passion is inhuman, and therefore it is not really moral.  A woman who thinks of this sacrament of love, for which perhaps the man who loves her has kept himself clean all his life, as a base thing, and who treats it as though it were a concession to something base in a man’s nature, instead of being the very consecration of body and soul at once, the sacrament of union, one of the loveliest things in human nature—­such a woman gives as great a shock to what is sacred and lovely in her husband’s nature as he when he brings with him into his marriage the associations of the street.  It is as hard, it is as insulting, it makes marriage as difficult in understanding, one way as the other.  For it is not true that our bodies are vile and base; they are the temples of the Holy Spirit.

Or if you think that you can stand alone, that what you do is the concern of no one else, that your life is a solitary thing, so solitary that no man or woman is concerned, no one but yourself, and you may sin alone—­there again you misunderstand.  You cannot stand alone, and nothing that you say or think or do leaves the world unchanged.  Is that difficult to believe in these days, when psychology is teaching us how all-important thought is?  Ought you to find it hard to believe that what you do in the utmost secrecy affects others, since it affects you, and no man lives to himself alone?  I do not wish to exaggerate.  I have a horror of those books and people who speak in exaggerated terms of any kind of sexual lapse.  I am persuaded that human beings can rise from such mistakes, and rise much more easily than from the subtler spiritual sins which have so much more respectable an air.  But yet do not sin under the impression that what you do concerns yourself alone.  Do not use, for your own satisfaction only, powers which were given you for creation and for the world.

But this, you may say, is not the accepted standard of morality.  That is a matter rather of laws and ceremonies.  And people begin to ask; “What real difference can a mere ceremony make?” It does not make any difference to the morality of your relationships with your fellow men and women.  Nothing that is immoral becomes moral because it has been done under a legal contract, or consecrated by a rite.  There, I think, is where the world has gone so wrong.  The idea that a relation that is selfish, cruel, mercenary, becomes moral because someone has said some words over you, and you have signed a register—­what a farcical idea!  How on earth does that change anything at all?  The morality of all civil or religious ceremony lies, I think, in this—­that by accepting and going through it, you accept the fact that your love does