cannot be redeemed by the love and devotion and the grace of God in the hearts of those who seek to make it redeemable.  What I do say is that in Church and State we should concentrate all our efforts on helping men and women to a wise, enlightened, noble conception of marriage before they enter upon it, and not on a futile and immoral attempt to hold them together by a mere legal contract when all that made it valid has fled.

I believe that the more one knows of human nature the more one reverences it.  I believe that the vast majority of human beings strain every nerve rather than fail in so great a responsibility.  Do you remember reading in Mr. Bertrand Russell’s book, “Principles of Social Reconstruction,” of a little church of which it was discovered, not, I think, very long ago, that, owing to some defect in its title, marriages which had been celebrated there were not legal?  Mr. Bertrand Russell says that there were at that time I forget how many couples still living who had been married in that church, who found that, by this legal defect, they were not legally bound.  Do you know how many of those married people seized the opportunity to desert each other and go and marry somebody else?  Not a single one!  Every one of those couples went quietly away to church and got married again!

Religious people do sometimes think such mean things of human nature, and human nature is, for the most part, so much nobler, so much more loyal, so much more loving than we imagine.  “Lift up your eyes unto the hills from whence cometh your help.”  “He that walketh in the light, stumbleth not, for he seeth the light of the world.”

Let us face the future courageously, with great reverence for other people’s opinions and views.  Let us not join that mob of shouters who are prepared to howl at everyone who desires to say something that is not quite orthodox, but which is their serious and considered contribution to a great and difficult problem.  Let us greet them with respect, however much we may differ from them.  Let us look forward without fear.  Believe me, below all the froth and scum of which we make so much, human nature is very noble.

Let us give that example to the world which is worth a thousand arguments—­the example of a noble married life, the example of a noble single life.  Those of you who are alone can do infinitely more for virtue by being full of gentleness, wisdom, sanity, and love than by any harsh repression of yourselves.  It is by what you can make of celibacy that the world will judge celibacy.  And so of married lovers.  Believe me, it is not the children of married lovers who are rebels against a lofty standard.  Those who have seen with their eyes a lovely, faithful and unwavering love are not easily satisfied with anything that is less.  “Lift up your eyes unto the hills.  From whence cometh your strength.”  And in the light of a great ideal, in the light of knowledge, sincerity and truth, in the light of what I know of human nature, I, for one, am not afraid for the future moral standard of this country.