But, we read on, Birth Control methods are not merely contrary to “moral law,” but forbidden because they are “unnatural,” being “the perversion of a natural function.”  This, of course, is the weakest link in the whole chain.  Yet “there is no question of the lawfulness of birth restriction through abstinence”—­as though abstinence itself were not unnatural!  For more than a thousand years the Church was occupied with the problem of imposing abstinence on its priesthood, its most educated and trained body of men, educated to look upon asceticism as the finest ideal; it took one thousand years to convince the Catholic priesthood that abstinence was “natural” or practicable.(3) Nevertheless, there is still this talk of abstinence, self-control, and self-denial, almost in the same breath with the condemnation of Birth Control as “unnatural.”

If it is our duty to act as “cooperators with the Creator” to bring children into the world, it is difficult to say at what point our behavior is “unnatural.”  If it is immoral and “unnatural” to prevent an unwanted life from coming into existence, is it not immoral and “unnatural” to remain unmarried from the age of puberty?  Such casuistry is unconvincing and feeble.  We need only point out that rational intelligence is also a “natural” function, and that it is as imperative for us to use the faculties of judgment, criticism, discrimination of choice, selection and control, all the faculties of the intelligence, as it is to use those of reproduction.  It is certainly dangerous “to frustrate the natural ends for which these faculties were created.”  This also, is always intrinsically wrong—­as wrong as lying and blasphemy—­and infinitely more devastating.  Intelligence is as natural to us as any other faculty, and it is fatal to moral development and growth to refuse to use it and to delegate to others the solution of our individual problems.  The evil will not be that one’s conduct is divergent from current and conventional moral codes.  There may be every outward evidence of conformity, but this agreement may be arrived at, by the restriction and suppression of subjective desires, and the more or less successful attempt at mere conformity.  Such “morality” would conceal an inner conflict.  The fruits of this conflict would be neurosis and hysteria on the one hand; or concealed gratification of suppressed desires on the other, with a resultant hypocrisy and cant.  True morality cannot be based on conformity.  There must be no conflict between subjective desire and outward behavior.

To object to these traditional and churchly ideas does not by any means imply that the doctrine of Birth Control is anti-Christian.  On the contrary, it may be profoundly in accordance with the Sermon on the Mount.  One of the greatest living theologians and most penetrating students of the problems of civilization is of this opinion.  In an address delivered before the Eugenics Education Society of London,(4) William Ralph Inge, the Very Reverend Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, pointed out that the doctrine of Birth Control was to be interpreted as of the very essence of Christianity.