No, but with his mate.
On this point we trust that there will not remain any obscurity. There is no higher God than Love. There is no higher love than sexual-love in its highest manifestation. The more we truly love, the more love flows into and through our consciousness, until from a tiny little pearly drop of the "wine of life" we ascend to the Olympian Heights and imbibe floods of the "nectar of the Gods."
Even the libertine, that pauper in the realm of Love, wants the perfect life. His soul is forever hungry for that which he gropingly tries to catch and chain and possess; and which by virtue of these same desires will evade him until he ceases thus to seek, and instead of demanding possession of the object of his desires, he asks for union. Union is interior; possession is always and ever limited to exterior contact. They who would enter the sanctuary and defile the "Holy of Holies" are saved from such a load of self-inflicted sin; they cannot if they would. There is but one key which will open the golden gate to heaven. The way chosen by the libertine is in exactly the opposite direction.
Are all marriages that are not soul-mate unions immoral? Most certainly not. Are all unions that are not married immoral. Most certainly not.
We have made an attempt to define sexual immorality and we have concluded that as yet there is no absolute standard in civilized or uncivilized ethics, since, as Letourneau points out, what is immoral in Pekin or Calcutta may be moral in Paris or London. Truth is adherence to facts in whatever section of the world. Tolerance; sympathy; charity; may be clearly defined wherever we roam. Sexual immorality has no stable standards. We here suggest one and submit that it is the only one possible of universal concurrence. It is based upon personal freedom. Wherever the sexual relation is made a convenience; or where either one marries in the face of his or her own realization that there is no love bestowed, that relationship is immoral. Thus, it will be seen that sexual immorality is independent of marriage, and cannot be estimated by law. Marriage for money; for position; for convenience; for anything other than a desire for mutual helpfulness, is immoral. Indulgence in the sexual act for selfish gratification without regard to the welfare of each other; for money; or pastime; or for any motive other than a reverential expression of an unselfish love, is immoral and is a prostitution of the divine office of sex.
But, though not all sex relationships can be perfect and eternal, yet all may, if we desire, be moral. And all moral and sexual relationships must, and will, lead to perfect sex-union, whenever the time comes that either one is ready for the completement. This truth need not, and will not, disrupt any happy marriages.
If the Church had not made the mistake of teaching the fallacy that sex-love is a strictly earthly or mortal function, divorcing Sex from pure love; and if the Theology had not tried to substitute the love of, and union with, an abstract Creator for love of mates in soul-union, perhaps there would be exhibited less impatience of the restraints of marriage.
But with a cat-and-dog married life on the one hand and the prospect of an inane, blank, and sexless union with an abstract God-idea on the other, it is small wonder that mortal consciousness has rebelled, and has decided to take its chances with Hell, rather than to forego the happiness which is intuitively sensed as being the direct prerogative of perfect mating.
If this God-idea had not been presented as an eternal, unescapable finality, there might have been hope; but to fly about a throne endlessly, night and day, singing, "I want to be nothing; nothing; only to lie at His feet"—the prospect appalls!
Small wonder that the conclusion has been deduced that "life is too short" for anything like domestic misery, when domestic happiness is the only happiness we know, and that is to cease at death!