“I will be wise,
    And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies
    Such power, for I grow weary to behold
    The selfish and the strong still tyrannize
    Without reproach or check.”

And there is a wonderful flowering of the young life in religious feeling and aspiration; a large majority of religious conversions take place in adolescence.

We can scarcely escape the conviction that these are not different awakenings, but rather different phases of the one great awakening of the young life as it prepares for the tasks and responsibilities of manhood and womanhood.  The part that sex development plays in this awakening has been variously stressed by different special students of the physiology and psychology of adolescence.  Some scientists have not hesitated to give it first place and to treat social passion and religious enthusiasm as secondary manifestations of sex energy.[59] However that may be, we know that each speaks naturally in terms of the other.  The religious mystic of the Middle Ages was devoted to the Divine Lover or the Heavenly Lady, and the modern revolutionary is wedded to the Cause.  On the other hand, the lover naturally adopts the language of religion to express his devotion to the lady of his heart.  The water-tight compartment theory of life is in these days thoroughly discredited.  We know that the various powers of soul and body are related and interdependent, and we feel sure that the developing powers of sex do have very vital relation to developing powers of moral purpose and religious aspiration.  In support of this relation we recall the unfortunate effects upon the character of those who by chance or the barbarity of men have been desexed in childhood.  We must allow for other factors at work here, yet the clearly established facts of the stunting of mental and moral growth in desexed children reinforce our own experience and observation, and indicate that the energies that are developed with sex and maturity are largely available for moral and religious growth.  The youth with full sex consciousness and impulse is normally the youth of abundant energy for moral and religious activity.  It seems, therefore, quite fundamental to the right understanding of sex that we consider the body, not the enemy of the soul, but its friend; not a clog upon the spiritual growth of boy and girl advancing into manhood and womanhood, but an important source of energy for the upward climb.

When we turn to the second part of our discussion and ask how in matters of sex soul helps flesh, the need and the fact are clearer and perhaps more urgent.  Dante found the souls of the lustful in the second circle of hell, driven hither and thither by warring winds,—­

                    “The stormy blast of hell
    With restless fury drives the spirits on,
    Whirled round and dashed amain with sore annoy.”

Here we have clear recognition of the two great characters of sex impulse, its violence and its fitfulness.  In the one character it needs to be subdued that it may not destroy; in the other it needs to be directed that it may build up.