As we look back through history, and as we look abroad through our land and through all civilized lands, one of the most conspicuous facts concerning the powers of sex is their frightful destructiveness.  The spectacle of wasted manhood and womanhood, of depleted powers in body, mind, and soul, is in history and in present society appalling.  It is so oppressive that it has driven many thoughtful men and women to despair.  Men otherwise hopeful and purposeful here become gloomy and fatalistic; they have no hope that lust will ever be effectively controlled.

Such pessimism, however, contradicts the history as well as the instincts of the race.  In the face of great evils there have always been those who would sit down in discouragement despair; every great destructive force in human history has daunted some men to the point of inactivity.  Yet the evils have been controlled.  Ignorant and fearful people have said, “This thing is beyond human power; it is useless for us to struggle against fate.”  Yet men of vision and of courage have struggled and won.  No man of moral passion and religious purpose can adopt an attitude of passive submission to the forces of destruction.  We can admit no necessary evil, or the battle of human progress is lost.  We ask ourselves soberly, therefore, how this tremendous outrush of destructive energy may be controlled.  The answer is plain.  Men have by the agency of fire itself constructed the means by which fire is controlled and domesticated; they have turned disease against itself, and by the agency of antitoxins have conquered it; they are learning to arouse and organize the fighting spirit of men against its own most ancient and fearful expression and are enlisting soldiers of peace in a war against war.  Even so the race depends upon the higher affections for control of the lower, and lust is controlled by love.  I talked once to a young man in college who had given himself to sexual vice when he had been in high school; until a year before I spoke with him, he had supposed that virtually all men were and must be sexually indulgent.  For twelve months he had kept himself clean.  I inquired why and how.  He replied simply that he had fallen in love with a young woman and wished to marry her.  His former course now seemed to him shameful and unmanly.  Lust yielding to love!  In one of his sonnets to the woman who afterward became his wife, Edmund Spenser says:—­

    “You frame my thoughts and fashion me within: 
    You stop my tongue and teach my heart to speak: 
    You calm the storm that passion did begin: 
    Strong through your cause, but by your virtue weak.”

In our own experience, as far as we have achieved victory in our own bodies and minds over our baser passions, we have achieved it by the power of the higher affections.  It is a fact of common experience that love calms the storm that passion did begin.  So Spenser’s lady strengthened passion by her charm, but weakened it by her virtue.