For it so happens that I come on both sides of my house from stocks of Englishmen who, nearly three hundred years ago, had encountered just these same difficulties and dangers before.  In the seventeenth century, indeed, the battle was around the problem of religion, as to-day it is around the problem of sex.  Since I have of late years realized this analogy I have often thought of certain admirable and obscure men who were driven out, robbed, and persecuted, some by the Church because the spirit of Puritanism moved within them, some by the Puritans because they clung to the ideals of the Church, yet both alike quiet and unflinching, both alike fighting for causes of freedom or of order in a field which has now for ever been won.  That victory has often seemed of good augury to the perhaps degenerate child of these men who has to-day sought to maintain the causes of freedom and of order in another field.

It sometimes seems, indeed, a hopeless task to move the pressure of inert prejudices which are at no point so obstinate as this of sex.  It may help to restore the serenity of our optimism if we would more clearly realize that in a very few generations all these prejudices will have perished and be forgotten.  He who follows in the steps of Nature after a law that was not made by man, and is above and beyond man, has time as well as eternity on his side, and can afford to be both patient and fearless.  Men die, but the ideas they seek to kill live.  Our books may be thrown to the flames, but in the next generation those flames become human souls.  The transformation is effected by the doctor in his consulting room, by the teacher in the school, the preacher in the pulpit, the journalist in the press.  It is a transformation that is going on, slowly but surely, around us.

I am well aware that many will not feel able to accept the estimate of the sexual situation as here set forth, more especially in the final volume.  Some will consider that estimate too conservative, others too revolutionary.  For there are always some who passionately seek to hold fast to the past; there are always others who passionately seek to snatch at what they imagine to be the future.  But the wise man, standing midway between both parties and sympathizing with each, knows that we are ever in the stage of transition.  The present is in every age merely the shifting point at which past and future meet, and we can have no quarrel with either.  There can be no world without traditions; neither can there be any life without movement.  As Heracleitus knew at the outset of modern philosophy, we cannot bathe twice in the same stream, though, as we know to-day, the stream still flows in an unending circle.  There is never a moment when the new dawn is not breaking over the earth, and never a moment when the sunset ceases to die.  It is well to greet serenely even the first glimmer of the dawn when we see it, not hastening towards it with undue speed, nor leaving the sunset without gratitude for the dying light that once was dawn.