Drink
I have kept to the last the social evil which more than all the others put together tends to produce sexual immorality. As I have already said, it is a comparatively rare thing for a man to "go wrong" for the first time when he is entirely sober. It is Bacchus that conducts men into the courts of Venus. Mr. Flexner, who for scientific reasons made a comprehensive study of Prostitution in Europe, reports that in every country the whole traffic is "soaked in drink." There are inhibitions in our humanity which make sexual vice repulsive to our taste, and there are few who can get past these inhibitions until alcohol has deadened their better feelings. Man after man has told me that it was after some festive night when he had taken more wine than ever before that he first fell. Unmarried mothers have told me that what happened on the night that was fatal to them was that they were cajoled into taking champagne or whisky, and after that could not well remember what took place.
It is not too much to say that until we have grappled with the drink evil in our midst we cannot possibly hope to master this greater evil which follows on the heels of intemperance. This one consideration alone would make me an enthusiastic prohibitionist. We have tried life on the present terms and it has beaten us. We have allowed the common sale of a drug that is the proved enemy of our best life. It has damaged us physically, industrially, and financially. But its most deadly damage has been done in connection with our sexual life. It not only misleads the unmarried, but in many homes it is daily destroying all possibility of married happiness. No doubt the difficulties of temperance reform are very great. But the real cause of the delay of effective reform is want of will in the community as a whole. I cannot but think that if the deadly and intimate connection between drink and sexual vice were realized, the will to effective reform might appear among us.
When I consider all the forces which I have thus briefly reviewed, and remember that behind them there is the power of a central and universal human instinct, I no longer wonder that sexual follies abound in our country, and that we have not yet solved the problem of purity. What I do wonder at is that there are hundreds of thousands of young men and women who, in spite of all these facts, insist on living clean and pure lives. There is something in human nature that fights very hard for the true way of life. Boys and girls with bad hereditary influences to hamper them, and brought up in very unfavorable surroundings, do yet constantly refuse to succumb. Even those who have made mistakes constantly refuse to be beaten, and hold on tenaciously to the narrow way. Though the modern world has been deluged with novels written to display sexual irregularities in a romantic light, and to express contempt for Christian moral standards, and though no doubt thousands have been misled, it remains true that surprisingly large numbers refuse to be befooled in such ways. I believe the reason is that, strong as mere physical desire may be, love is a stronger thing still. And it is the power of love that keeps many right. In many men it is love for an ideal woman that does it. They keep themselves from evil because, though they may never have met her, they believe one day they will, and they want to bring her their best selves without any spot of defilement. In many girls love works in the same redemptive way. And perhaps in both what is really working is a mystic longing after the best that life can hold, and a half-conscious understanding that that best is only for those who preserve unity between body and spirit, and keep the body in bonds until the pure command of love itself summons it to freedom.
And yet it is infamous that the struggle should be so hard for so many. All of us who are ignorant or complacent or skeptical about the social evils of our time are sharers in the iniquity of those who fall. Many of us live in mean satisfaction, just because we ourselves have found comfort and security; that is how these evil forces are able to go on year after year leading thousands to their undoing. If the test of a real passion for purity lies in caring about the forces that make for impurity and caring to the point of suffering for those who fall, then I fear few of us have that passion in any really effective and holy form. And it will need passion to compete with the forces that lie behind evil social conditions. They are entrenched behind the power of money, and I know of only one passion that is stronger than money.
When will all who really love take up the challenge of this disordered modern world? We talk. We confer. We discuss social reform. But we do not love. And that is why Mammon is able to laugh at us, and go on dragging our boys and girls down into the mire.
CHAPTER XIII
FORGETTING THE THINGS WHICH ARE BEHIND
I have implied in this book that the very best in sexual experience is only for those who keep themselves unspotted in early life, and who come to the sacrament of marriage with no previous and lower experience of sex intimacy. I am even sure that the very best is spoilt a little by all previous unworthy thinking, and by all perverse practices.
I know that that will sound a hard saying to very many, for there are few who have fulfilled these conditions for knowing the best. It must seem to them that I am practically saying to them, "You can never now enter into the holy of holies." Yet I cannot alter what I have said, however acute may be my sympathy with those who have stumbled. I believe it is true, and no good ever came of hiding the truth. It is because it is true that I have such confident hope for mankind. Men and women do in their hearts want the very best, and when they come to know what are the only terms on which that very best can be had they will, I believe, accept those terms.