Nor is this the only higher affection that, in the practical experience of men, has controlled and transformed animal passion.  Thousands of fully sexed men have, through the centuries, turned their bodily and mental energies so fully to devoted service for God and their fellows as to rise above the clamoring demands of physical appetite, in the vigorous terms of the New Testament making themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of God’s sake.  This is a hard saying, and the experience it treats of must always be confined to a small number of men; yet it goes far toward demonstrating a general possibility, and it should effectively dispose of the “necessity” argument, by which men often excuse their vicious practices.

One thing more should be said on this subject of control.  Not only are the higher, more spiritual affections the most effective masters of the lower; they are the only effective masters.  Public reprobation can do much, but it is ineffectual with large numbers of relatively unattached members of society, and it is impotent against secret vice.  Motives of cautious fear are always weak with full-blooded and generous youth, and they are likely to become weaker with all men as medical science discovers ways to prevent or escape the most obviously fearful consequences of sexual license.

A familiar phrase comes to my mind, as no doubt it comes to yours:  “The expulsive power of the higher affections”; yet I think that phrase is not quite suitable.  It is not a question of expulsion.  It is not wholly a question of control; it is mainly a question of direction.  What we need to-day with boys and girls for the solving of the sex problems is to direct those energies, which in their false direction are destructive, into right and healthful ways; that is, we need to socialize and elevate that affection, which in baser forms has aspects of ugly animalism.

As one of the solutions of the problem of control it has been proposed to separate the sexes in the adolescent years.  From my point of view, this would defeat our object.  In the association of boys and girls during the adolescent period, we may enlist the higher affections for the control and the direction of the powers that are set free by sex impulses developed in that very period of life.

What happens in the experience of the normal boy?  In this period of early adolescence he finds within himself a wonderful quickening of mind,—­impulses, feelings, longings that he does not understand.  These impulses, feelings, longings, perplex him, it may be for years.  They reach out vaguely, blindly toward the opposite sex, sometimes in a perverted way, but oftener naturally and honestly.  Then the young man falls in love.  At once his more or less vague, cloudy, incoherent, formless feelings and purposes are concentrated, directed, and fixed in devotion to a young woman whom he idealizes, almost deifies.  That is the first stage in the natural directing and forming of sex powers and impulses toward