The solution of this great, urgent, pressing problem, which we are feeling the weight of more and more in these years of careful investigation of our social conditions, will come in frankly recognizing the beginnings upon which the whole sex life in mind and body is based, and in transforming fundamentally important animal instincts and desires into higher affections, humanizing them for the sake of the loved one, for the sake of family, for the sake of the social brotherhood and sisterhood in which we are members.

My closing word is one which seems to me most significant of the true, the beautiful, the victorious way out of so much discouragement and so much crime,—­that is the word “consecration.”  That word includes two essential ideas, the ideas of sacredness and cooeperation.  The problems of sex will never be solved until the sacredness of sex is recognized, for sex is vitally and indissolubly bound up with the two greatest facts that you and I know.  The greatest fact of the organized world around us is life, the greatest fact of the spiritual world into which we lift our souls is love, and the beginnings of life and the beginnings of love are in sex.  No boy or girl will readily understand what life means except as he has some clear, wise teaching about sex; no boy or girl will fully understand what love means except through recognition of the dignity and worth and purity of the fundamental facts and powers of sex.

Who shall give this enlightenment?  I think it must be clear that this enlightenment cannot be given by the very young and inexperienced person, that the facts can be rightly given only by some person who knows their sacredness for himself or herself.  They can be given best by a mature person who has seen and felt what they mean.  In the long run, I have no doubt that our boys and girls will get the information that they must have from their parents, for the father and the mother are the best qualified to give it.  I have named both the father and the mother, for the solution of our problem is not only in knowing the sacredness of sex, it is also in working together for the elevation of sex life.  We shall not be able, we men, in the future, to sit down and say, “Oh, well, John will learn from his mother”; “Mary’s mother will make that clear to her”; “Their mother does these things.”  It will not be possible for the socializing of the sex instincts and the ripening of the sex powers to be made clear to young people except as men and women both recognize the sacredness of the sex relation and undertake to make things clear to boys and girls.  Men must give up their selfish indifference to evil conditions, and women—­some women—­must give up the bitterness and hardness that come into their hearts and their faces when they think of the suffering that their sex has endured at the hands of man.  This is not a problem for one sex.  It cannot be solved by either half of the great whole of humanity.  We know this to be true in our personal