Men, Women, and God / A Discussion of Sex Questions from the Christian Point of View

by A. Herbert Gray

Then, secondly, why are wild oats evil things to sow? Why should we not endorse the shrug of the shoulders with which society treats them? I notice that even women lightly forgive them, and I believe they make a mistake. Forgiveness is indeed always a divine operation, but light forgiveness implies that nothing serious has happened. What then is so serious about licentiousness?

I must of necessity discriminate at this point. By wildness men often mean occasional intimacies into which they do not pretend to be led by love. About such experiences I suppose men would say that they amount merely to the satisfaction of a physical appetite, and that after they are over a man may go his way as little affected as is a man who has satisfied his thirst.

But that is not the truth about them. The man in such cases suffers damage. He suffers it because he has attempted an impossibility. He has tried to separate the various parts of his being, and to satisfy his animal nature without any consideration for his mind and heart. But sexual experience itself proves that that cannot be done. The sexual instinct is intimately related to our whole beings, but especially to our affections. At the moment of sexual intimacy a man at least pretends for the moment that he loves, and when he offers that pretence to someone whom in reality he despises and means to leave in an hour, he does violence to his whole nature. The soul of him insists all the time that this is a low business. His outraged mind and heart protest and produce an evil after-taste. No man likes to remember such events. The best of him could not enter into them. He is left jangled and upset. All that makes such doings seem right at any time is that when it has reached a certain degree of intensity passion seems to justify its own demands. That is the age-long illusion whereby evil deceives and betrays us. But till we have learnt to repudiate that suggestion we are not even on the way to succeed in this part of life. Often the men who defend such indulgences admit that they are gross, and then fall back upon the contention that a man must be gross at times—that his nature demands it. It is a fairly serious slander to offer to our sex. Fortunately there exist thousands of incarnate proofs that it is only a slander. We all know that his sexual nature sets the ordinary healthy man a very serious problem, and about that I have tried to speak with sympathy and charity in a later chapter. But the assertion that a man must be gross is hard to hear with patience. It is one of the lies that savor of cowardice.

By "wildness," however, men sometimes mean temporary intimate relations between men and women to which they are led by love, and such relationships are at least very different in moral quality from the gross ones I have spoken of.

Why must they be condemned? My whole contention is that love and love alone makes physical intimacy pure and right. Why then cannot love sanctify passionate relationships outside marriage? Why should the union of true lovers be held to be impure before marriage and pure after it?

Let me answer the last query first. I do not think the union of true lovers apart from marriage is impure. I believe that such lovers make a very serious mistake—a mistake that may turn out to have been cruel. I believe that society is utterly right in condemning such unions, and that those who really understand will always refuse to enter on them. But impure is not the word to apply to them. They are clean and beautiful compared to the bodily intimacies of those who marry without love. And yet I do not think that even emotionally they can ever be perfect. Sexual intimacy is not the perfect and sacramental thing which it is meant to be unless both parties come to it with free and untroubled minds, feeling that what they do is a right and happy thing. But in the unions of unmarried persons there generally lurks some half-hidden sense of shame. Some part of the being of one or the other really endorses society's standards, and even love cannot dispel the shadows thus created.

And yet still that does not meet the challenge to show the reason for society's standard. The reasons are really many. In the first place, if unmarried lovers take steps to prevent their intimacy from having its due fruit in a child, they are robbing their experience of its fine spontaneity, and introducing an element of calculation and caution into what should be a thing unbound. While, on the other hand, if they do not prevent the coming of a child they are, in the present state of society, doing a definite and cruel wrong to their own offspring. To love a child dearly and to know that by your own act you have handicapped it in life from the first must be a bitter experience indeed. I am well aware that law in regard to illegitimate children is unchristian. Even more is the attitude of society to them unchristian. But so long as things remain as they are, the parents of an illegitimate child do it a wrong. Further, even though law and custom should alter, it would still be true that a child without both its own parents is seriously handicapped in life. Which leads on to my next point; for, secondly, if two lovers really love, they want to give their whole selves to one another, including their whole futures. No man truly and loyally loves a woman who wants to keep open a loophole of escape from her. It would be well if women would always apply this test to the passionate protestations of men. Real love is love without reserve. True sexual intimacy in itself means taking each other for better or for worse, and when lovers unite themselves though still unwilling for such permanent unions, their love is not perfect. They are not really united by love. They are letting mere present desire carry them away. I hear of many men, and even of some women, who ask why they should not have many lovers if they have many friends. The answer is that no man gives his whole self to a friend, but that love, when it is real, does mean the giving of your whole self. And that, plainly, a man can only do to one woman and a woman to one man.

It is generally in defense of temporary unions that people question the necessity for marriage vows. But temporary unions cannot be ended happily. If they were entered on without love, they are gross things, as I have already said; and if they were the creation of real love, there is no happy way out of them. The two have been too close to one another to part without tearing apart—leaving ragged and it may be bleeding edges on their personalities. Then again, as I have tried to show already, love is only made perfect when it is allowed to issue in responsibilities and labors. Divorced from them it is a selfish thing. There is a wild and lawless element in passion, which is part of its glory. But that glory is only sweetened and justified for those who let their passion carry them through the whole career of experience to which it summons them.

All this may be accepted as establishing a case for permanent unions as the only legitimate things, but inasmuch as it claims that the demand for permanence lies in the very heart of love itself it may still be asked with some urgency, "Why introduce a marriage ceremony with public vows?" And here I must follow a somewhat different line of thought which may at first sight seem contradictory. In spite of all that I have said, I believe that even ardent lovers are all the better for being bound, because of the wayward element of inconstancy in human nature. Thousands of married persons have never once been conscious of their vows. They have never come near thinking, "We must hold together because we promised," or "We must make the best of things because we are tied together." Thousands have never for a moment wanted to change their condition. But with others it is not so. No men or women are always at their best. Though they may have had moments on the heights when they gladly took each other for better or for worse, there will come other moods when the finer notes of love will not sound in their ears. There will come to all but a few couples hours when they will be irritated and annoyed with one another. And if they were free to do so, they might fling away from each other and so miss after all the best that was to be. For the best is not to be found in those early days when passion flames and dominates, but rather in those later days when two personalities have at last become really fitted to each other and when the daily round of labor is illumined by the lamp of love. And therefore, being what we are, it is a good thing for our own sakes that we should be bound.

Even though the bonds should actually mean pain, it is still good that they should be allowed to bind, though it be only for the sake of the children. Passionate lovers do not think of children, but society must needs put their claims before all others. Probably the historical reason why society came to insist on monogamy and to condemn all irregular unions lay in the fact that it is the inalienable right of a child to be brought up by a father and a mother, and that no society can be strong and finely ordered unless its foundations are laid in family life, wherein men and women co-operate to give the rising generation every possible chance.