Even if the reader is still inclined to think that sex-knowledge is, at best, an unholy secret, he will hardly doubt that it can be divulged with less injury by an adult who is earnestly anxious for the child’s welfare than by coarse and irreverent lips.

I am not content to leave the reader in this dilemma.  I am confident that the following words of Canon Lyttelton spring from the truest spiritual insight:  “To a lover of nature, no less than to a convinced Christian, the subject ought to wear an aspect not only negatively innocent, but positively beautiful.  It is a recurrent miracle, and yet the very type and embodiment of law; and it may be confidently affirmed that, in spite of the blundering of many generations, there is nothing in a normally-constituted child’s mind which refuses to take in the subject from this point of view, provided that the right presentation of it is the first.”

Nothing more forcibly convicts the present system of the evil which lies at its door than the current beliefs on this subject.  At present, sexual knowledge is picked up from the gutter and the cesspool; and no purification can free it entirely in many minds from its original uncleanness.

“Love’s a virtue for heroes!—­as white as the snow on high hills,
And immortal as every great soul is that struggles, endures,
and fulfils.”

This is the prophet’s belief, and yet, putting on one side those who actually delight in uncleanness, there appear to be many people who look upon the marriage certificate as a licence to impurity, and upon sexual union as a form of animal indulgence to which we are so strongly impelled that even the most refined are tempted by it into an act of conscious indelicacy and sin.  Such people read literally the psalmist’s words:  “Behold, I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.”  It is surely some such feeling as this which makes parents shrink from referring to the subject, which underlies the constant use of the word “innocence” as the aptest description of a state of mind which precedes the acquisition of sexual knowledge.

That individuals, at least, have risen to a loftier conception than this is certain; and the only possible explanations of the prevalence of the current idea are that sex-knowledge has almost always been obtained from a tainted source; and that, while the coarse have not merely whispered their views in the ear in the closet, but have, in all ages, proclaimed them from the house-tops, the refined have hardly whispered their ideas, much less discussed them publicly.  Children growing up with perverted views have listened to the loud assertions of disputants on the one side, have witnessed the demoralisation which so often attends the sexual passion, but have received no hint of what may be said on the other side of the question.