An instructed public opinion would be horrified at our sovereign’s taking shares in a slave-trading expedition as Queen Elizabeth did.  We are aghast at the days when crowds went forth to enjoy the torture at the stake of those from whom they differed merely on some metaphysical point.  We have even begun to be restless under man’s cruel domination over the animal creation.  But we have made far less advance in our conceptions on sexual matters; and we are content here with ideas which were current in Elizabethan days.  But for this, no passion for conservatism, no reverence for a liturgy endeared by centuries of use, could induce us to tell every bride as she stands before God’s altar that it is one of her functions to provide an outlet for her husband’s passion and a safeguard against fornication.  Lust is at least as degrading in married life as it is outside it.  No legal contract, no religious ceremony, can purify, much less sanctify, what is essentially impure.

Those who desire to assist in the uplifting of humanity cannot afford to be silent and to allow judgment to go against them by default.  Courage they will need; for a charge of indecency is sure to be levelled against them by the indecent, and they may be misjudged even by the pure.

This is not the place in which so delicate a matter can be fully discussed, nor does space permit; but if the movement towards sex instruction is not to be stultified by the very ideas which evidence the need for it, the subject cannot be wholly ignored here, and I venture to throw out a few suggestions.

Are we indeed to believe that the noblest and most spiritual of men will compromise themselves in the eyes of the woman they love best, and whose respect they most desire, by committing in her presence and making her the instrument of an indelicate act?  A great poet, who remained an ardent lover and a devoted companion until his wife died in his arms—­blissfully happy that she might die so—­has written: 

    “Let us not always say,
    ’Spite of the flesh to-day
    I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole.’ 
    As the bird wings and sings,
    Let us cry, ’All good things
    Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul.’”

Again:  are we, who believe in a Divine government of the world, able to imagine that God has made the perpetuation of the race dependent upon acts of sin or of indelicacy?  Did He who graced with His presence the marriage at Cana in Galilee really countenance a ceremony which was a prelude to sin?  Did He who took the little children in His arms and blessed them know, as He said “for of such is the kingdom of heaven,” that not one of them could have existed without indelicacy, and that they were but living proof of their fathers’ lapses and their mothers’ humiliation?  Is He whom we address daily as “Our Father” willing to be described by a name with which impurity is of necessity connected?  And has He implanted in us as the strongest of our instincts that which cannot elevate and must debase?