twentieth century who does not know that a man or a woman who has not the gift of continency is totally unfit for marriage is really rather startling.  What such a person requires is both a divine and a physician; but that he should be told that he is fit for marriage and that marriage was expressly designed for him is not only misleading, it is absolutely horrifying.  It explains the tragic wreck which so many marriages become after a comparatively short time.

I would urge, then, for the future, that we should not concentrate all our moral, ethical, religious, and social force on perpetuating the tragic failure of an empty marriage, but, rather, should concentrate our efforts on trying to make people understand what marriage is; what their own natures are; what marriage is going to demand from them; what they need in order to make it noble.  I urge, moreover, that the same principle should apply to those who do not marry—­that they also should learn in the light what their difficulties are going to be; how to face their own temperaments; how to deal with their own minds and bodies.  Your temperament, men and women, does not decide your destiny; it does decide your trials.  To know how to deal with it and how to make it your servant, how so to enthrone spiritual power in your nature that it shall dominate all that is physical, not as something base, but as a sacred and a consecrated thing—­it is on this that the teachers of to-day should concentrate with all their power.  It is true that when we have learnt all that is possible from teaching, there is still something to learn.  In marriage is it possible to know finally until the final step is taken?  No, I do not think so.  But when you consider how we have struggled against ignorance, how many pitfalls have been put in the path of those who desired knowledge, how we have, as it seems, done our best to make this relationship a failure, surely it is worth while, at least, to try what knowledge, and understanding, and education, and training can do.  We cannot know all.  That is no reason why we should not know all that we can.

Surely marriage must be a divine institution, since we have done so much to make it a failure, and yet one sees again and again such splendid love, such magnificent loyalty and faith!  “You advocate,” someone wrote to me the other day, “you advocate that people should leave each other when they are tired of each other.”  No, I do not advocate that anyone should accept a failure.  I advocate that every human being should do all that is possible—­more perhaps than is possible without the grace of God—­to make marriage the noble and lovely thing it should be.  I think those are faint-hearted who easily accept the fact that it is difficult, and from that drift swiftly to the conclusion that for them it is impossible.  I advocate that the greatest faith and loyalty should be practised.  I believe in my heart that there is perhaps no relationship which