By the term “spiritual” we are not to understand any mysterious and supernatural qualities.  It is simply a convenient name, in distinction from animal, to cover all those higher mental and emotional processes which in human evolution are ever gaining greater power.  It is needless to enumerate the constituents of this spiritual end of sexual intercourse, for everyone is entitled to enumerate them differently and in different order.  They include not only all that makes love a gracious and beautiful erotic art, but the whole element of pleasure in so far as pleasure is more than a mere animal gratification.  Our ancient ascetic traditions often make us blind to the meaning of pleasure.  We see only its possibilities of evil and not its mightiness for good.  We forget that, as Romain Rolland says, “Joy is as holy as Pain.”  No one has insisted so much on the supreme importance of the element of pleasure in the spiritual ends of sex as James Hinton.  Rightly used, he declares, Pleasure is “the Child of God,” to be recognised as a “mighty storehouse of force,” and he pointed out the significant fact that in the course of human progress its importance increases rather than diminishes.[8] While it is perfectly true that sexual energy may be in large degree arrested, and transformed into intellectual and moral forms, yet it is also true that pleasure itself, and above all, sexual pleasure, wisely used and not abused, may prove the stimulus and liberator of our finest and most exalted activities.  It is largely this remarkable function of sexual pleasure which is decisive in settling the argument of those who claim that continence is the only alternative to the animal end of marriage.  That argument ignores the liberating and harmonising influences, giving wholesome balance and sanity to the whole organism, imparted by a sexual union which is the outcome of the psychic as well as physical needs.  There is, further, in the attainment of the spiritual end of marriage, much more than the benefit of each individual separately.  There is, that is to say, the effect on the union itself.  For through harmonious sex relationships a deeper spiritual unity is reached than can possibly be derived from continence in or out of marriage, and the marriage association becomes an apter instrument in the service of the world.  Apart from any sexual craving, the complete spiritual contact of two persons who love each other can only be attained through some act of rare intimacy.  No act can be quite so intimate as the sexual embrace.  In its accomplishment, for all who have reached a reasonably human degree of development, the communion of bodies becomes the communion of souls.  The outward and visible sign has been the consummation of an inward and spiritual grace.  “I would base all my sex teaching to children and young people on the beauty and sacredness of sex,” wrote a distinguished woman; “sex intercourse is the great sacrament of life, he that eateth and drinketh unworthily eateth and drinketh