Above all, the example of her spotless purity.  It is notorious that one of the most marked features of our time is the virulent assault on purity.  We had long emphasised a certain quality of conduct which we called modesty; it was, perhaps, largely a convention, but it was one of those protective conventions which are valuable as preservative of qualities we prize.  It was protective of purity; and however artificial it was, in some respects, it existed because we felt that purity was a thing too precious to be exposed to unnecessary risk.  Well, modesty is gone now, whether in conduct or convention.  One hears discussed at dinner-tables and in the presence of young girls matters which our mothers would have blushed to mention at all.  The quality of modesty is declared Puritanical and hypocritical.  “Hypocritical virtue” is a phrase one frequently meets; and we seem fast going on to the time when all virtue will be regarded as hypocrisy.  Customary standards are falling all about us, overthrown in the name of personal liberty.

And by liberty, one gathers, is meant freedom to do as one pleases, and especially as one sexually pleases.  The assault is pushed hardest just now against the sanctity of the sacrament of matrimony and the morals of that sacrament as they have been developed by the Christian Church.  Protestantism long ago assented to the overthrow of Christian standards in the marriage relation and has aided the sexual anarchy with which we are faced to-day.  To-day the chief attack is on the purity of marriage in the interests, ostensibly, of humanity.  A vigorous campaign in favour of what is called birth-control is being carried on, and is being supported in quarters which are professedly Christian.  There are many grounds for opposing the movement, social, humanitarian and other.  We are here concerned with it only as it is an attack on purity.  From the Christian point of view the marriage relation has for its end the procreation of children for the upbuilding of the Kingdom of God.  If circumstances are such, through reasons of health or economy, that children seem undesirable, the remedy is plain, self control.  The theory that human beings have no more control over their appetites than beasts, while it has much to support it in contemporary life, cannot be admitted from the point of view of religion.  Self-control is always possible, and is constantly exercised by many men and women who choose to be guided by principle rather than by passion.  And in any case the Christian Religion can become no partner, not even a silent one, in a conspiracy to murder, or in the sort of compromise that turns marriage into a licensed sodomy.  If indeed the economic status of the modern world is such that the average couple cannot support a family, then the Christian Church may well aid in the bringing about of an economic revolution; but it can hardly aid in the destruction of its own ideals of purity.