Again:  it needs no wide experience of life, nor any very indulgent view of it, to feel some truth at least in the words Tennyson puts into the mouth of his ideal man: 

                        “Indeed I knew
    Of no more subtle master under heaven
    Than is the maiden passion for a maid
    Not only to keep down the base in man,
    But teach high thought, and amiable words,
    And courtliness, and the desire for fame,
    And love of truth, and all that makes a man.”

And yet this passion is indisputably sexual passion, and the chastest of lovers has bodily proof that the most spiritual of his kisses is allied to the supreme embrace of love.  Our body is the instrument by which all our emotions are expressed.  The most obvious way of expressing affection is by bodily contact.  The mother fondles her child, kisses its lips and its limbs, and presses it to her breast.  Young children hold hands, put their arms round one another and kiss; and, although later we become less demonstrative, we still take our friend’s arm, press his hand with ours, and lay a hand upon his shoulder; we pat our horse or dog and stroke our cat.  The lover returns to the spontaneous and unrestrained caresses of his childhood.  These become more and more intimate until they find their consummation in the most intimate and most sacred of all embraces.  From first to last these caresses—­however deep the pleasure they bestow—­are sought by the mother or the lover, not for the sake of that pleasure, but as a means of expressing emotion.  He only who realises this fact and conforms to it can enter on married life with any certainty of happiness.  The happiness of very many marriages is irretrievably shattered at the outset through the craving for sexual excitement which, in the absence of wise guidance, grows up in every normal boy’s heart, and by the contemplation of sexual intercourse as an act of physical pleasure.

And once again:  It is the experience of those who have given instruction in sex questions to the young that by those whose minds have never been defiled the instruction is received with instant reverence, as something sacred; not with shame, as something foul.  I venture once more to quote Canon Lyttelton, who sets forth his experience and my own in language the beauty of which I cannot imitate: 

“There is something awe-inspiring in the innocent readiness of little children to learn the explanation of by far the greatest fact within the horizon of their minds.  The way they receive it, with native reverence, truthfulness of understanding, and guileless delicacy, is nothing short of a revelation of the never-ceasing bounty of Nature, who endows successive generations of children with this instinctive ear for the deep harmonies of her laws.  People sometimes speak of the indescribable beauty of children’s innocence, and insist that there is nothing which calls for more constant thanksgiving than that influence on mankind.  But I will venture to say that no one quite knows what it is who has foregone the privilege of being the first to set before them the true meaning of life and birth and the mystery of their own being.”