If we want to see what is the final outcome of this moral code, of this one-sided and distorted ethic, we have only to turn our eyes to France. On the one hand we have "la jeune fille" in her white Communion robe, kept so pure and ignorant of all evil, that "une société ecclésiastique," I am told, exists for the emendation of history for her benefit—Divine Providence, as conducting the affairs of men, being far too coarse for her pure gaze; and at the other end of the stick we find Zola, and a literature intended only for the eyes of men, of whose chastity, according to Renan, "Nature takes no account whatever,"—a literature which fouls with its vile sewage the very wellsprings of our nature, and which, whatever its artistic merit, I make bold to say is a curse to the civilized world.

Now, I earnestly protest that while we have this social code, which is in direct violation of the moral law, we may set on foot any number of Rescue Societies, Preventive Agencies, Acts for the Legal Protection of the Young, etc., but all our efforts will be in vain. We are like a man who should endeavor to construct a perfect system of dynamics on the violation of Newton's first law of motion. The tacitly accepted necessity for something short of the moral law for men will—again I say it—work out with the certainty of a mathematical law a degraded and outcast class, with its disease, its insanity, its foul contamination of the young, its debasement of manhood, its disintegration of the State, its curse to the community. You cannot dodge the moral law; as Professor Clifford said, "There are no back-stairs to the universe" by which we can elude the consequences of our wrong, whether of thought or action. If you let in one evil premise by the back-door, be sure Sin and Death will come out at the front.

Here, then, you must take a firm and watchful stand. As the mothers of the future generation of men, you must look upon it as your divinely-appointed task to bring back the moral law in its entirety, the one standard equally binding on men and women alike. Whatever your creed, you have got to hold fast to this great truth, which life itself forces upon you, and which is a truth of Christian ethics because first of all it is a truth of life. It is simply a moral Q.E.D., that if chastity is a law for women—and no man would deny that—it is a law for every woman without exception; and if it is a law for every woman, it follows necessarily that it must be for every man, unless we are going to indulge in the moral turpitude of accepting a pariah class of women made up of other women's daughters and other women's sisters—not our own, God forbid that they should be our own!—set apart for the vices of men.

But perhaps, looking at our complicated civilization, which, at least in the upper classes, involves, as a rule, the deferring of marriage—looking at the strength of the passions which generations of indulgence have evolved beyond their natural limits, some women will feel constrained to ask, "Is this standard a possible one? Can men keep their health and strength as celibates? Is not my husband right when he says that this is a subject we women can know nothing about, and that here we must bow to the judgment of men?"

I answer that a mother must know by what standard she is to educate her boy, and therefore must have the data supplied to her on which to form her own judgment, and be fully persuaded in her own mind what she is to aim at in the training she is to give him; and the mere fact that the current judgment of men involves the sacrifice in body and soul of a large class of our fellow-women lays a paramount obligation upon all women to search for themselves into the truth and scientific accuracy of the premises on which that judgment is based.

"Can men keep their health and strength as celibates till such time as they have the means to marry?" is the question we have, then, to face. Is the standard of the moral law possible to men who have to maintain a high level of physical efficiency in the sharp competition of modern life?

Primarily, the answer to this question must come from the acknowledged heads of the medical profession. Now, I am thankful to say, we have in England a consensus of opinion from the representative men of the faculty that no one can gainsay. Sir James Paget, Acton in his great text-book, Sir Andrew Clark, Sir George Humphrey, of Cambridge, Professor Millar, of the Edinburgh University, Sir William Gowers, F.R.S., have all answered the above question in the strongest affirmative. "Chastity does no harm to body or mind; its discipline is excellent; marriage may safely be waited for," are Sir James Paget's terse and emphatic words[4]. Still more emphatic are the words of Sir William Gowers, the great men's specialist, who counts as an authority on the Continent as well as here:

"The opinions which on grounds falsely called 'physiological' suggest or permit unchastity are terribly prevalent among young men, but they are absolutely false. With all the force of any knowledge I possess, and any authority I have, I assert that this belief is contrary to fact; I assert that no man ever yet was in the slightest degree or way the worse for continence or better for incontinence. From incontinence during unmarried life all are worse morally; a clear majority, are, in the end, worse physically; and in no small number the result is, and ever will be, utter physical shipwreck on one of the many rocks, sharp, jagged-edged, which beset the way, or on one of the banks of festering slime which no care can possibly avoid. They are rocks which tear and rend the unhappy being who is driven against them when he has yielded to the tide of passion, they are banks which exhale a poison for which, no true antidote exists."

In face of such testimony as this, well might Mr. George Russell, in an address to young men, speak of "this exploded lie which has hitherto led so many astray."

Turning now from knowledge to fact, we have only to look at the French clergy to see that even in the extreme case of life-long celibacy it is not injurious to health. I know, in taking this case, I am grating somewhat harshly against Protestant prejudice. But the testimony that Renan bears on this point is irrefutable. Himself a renegade priest, he certainly would not have hesitated to expose the Order to which he had once belonged, and vindicate his broken vows by the revelation of any moral rottenness known within the walls of its seminaries. Far from this, he bears the most emphatic testimony in his autobiography that there is enough virtue in St. Sulpice alone to convert the world; and owns so strong was the impress made on his own soul by his training as a priest that personally he had lived a pure life, "although," he adds, with an easy shrug of his shoulders, "it is very possible that the libertine has the best of it!" Another renegade priest, also eminent in literature, bears exactly the same testimony. Indeed, when we remember the argus-eyed hatred with which the French priesthood is watched by the anti-clerical party, and the few scandals that appear in the public prints only too anxious to give publicity to them, this unimpeachable testimony is borne out by fact. I believe this testimony to be equally true of the English and Irish Roman Catholic clergy. Yet few would dispute the vigor of the physique of the Roman Catholic priests, or their capacity for hard and often exhausting work.