Now, this fact established, a whole world of new issues arises and demands settlement.  Among these, comes the supreme question:  What is the nature of this new experience that has been conferred upon human beings, over and above what is vouchsafed to any other form of animal life?  What purpose can it serve?  How can it be properly exercised?  What is right and what is wrong under these new possibilities?  These are some of the issues that force themselves upon all thoughtful people, those who wish to do right under any and all circumstances in which they are placed.

Of course, here as elsewhere, the unthinking, the happy-go-lucky and the “don’t-give-a-damn,” can blunder along in almost any-old-way.  But they can, and will, reap only the reward which always follows blundering and ignorance.  In these days of scientific clear-thinking, we have come to understand that salvation from sin comes by the way of positive knowledge and not at the hands of either ignorance or innocence!  If husbands and wives ever attain to the highest conditions of married life, it can only be after they know and practice, what is right in all their sex relations, both for reproductive purposes and in all other respects!  Note that well!

As things are now, especially in all civilized countries, and particularly among Christian people, this secondary function of sex in the human family, while blindly recognized as a fact, is none the less abused, to a most shameful degree.  For ages, the whole situation has been left in a condition of most deplorable, not to say damnable, ignorance; and no honest endeavor has been made to find out and act up to the truth in the premises.  Husbands and wives have engaged in coitus ad libitum, utterly regardless of whether it was right or wrong for them to do so!  They have taken it for granted that marriage conferred on them the right to have sexual intercourse whenever they chose, (especially when the man chose,) and they have acted accordingly.  This is especially true of men, and the practice has been carried to such length that the right of a man to engage in coitus with his wife has been established by law, and the wife who refuses to yield this “right” to her husband can be divorced by him, if she persists in such way of living!  It is such a fact as this which caused Mr. Bernard Shaw to write:  “Marriage is the most licentious institution in all the world.”  And he might rightfully have added “it is also the most brutal,” though it is an insult to the brute to say it that way, for brutes are never guilty of coitus under compulsion.  But a husband can force his wife to submit to his sexual embraces, and she has no legal right to say him nay! This doesn’t seem quite right, does it?