“Gott be danken.”
“There cannot be a more profitable and satisfactory possession than purity. It fills one with courage and truth, and makes honor easy. Its joys fade not away. Its hopes are fulfilled, and I believe if we were all possessors of this type of purity, and understood how to live according to its law, the social result would be, that humanity would become like the angels of God: right, bright, agile and light; with probably less marrying and no divorcing; because of the well-poised, well-contented lives to which such men and women will have attained. If all possessed this type of purity, there would be an end to these inordinate desires which now make some people to be self-tormented monsters, and others to be their victims. When this type of purity exists, then family life, worthy the name, will be established on a plane of health-giving-comfort to all concerned. While those who, St. Paul says, ‘do better than to marry, though to marry may be to do well,’ will be able, Bertha, to coöperate together in simple, unsullied service to the world, which always needs such service.
“When people come once to know the buoyant delight way down to old, old age, which is ushered in by a scientific life of purity, they will never thereafter rack themselves with the disorders and maniacal nervelessness which comes, Bertha, one way and another, from the abuse of vitality.
“It is doubtful if people, as a whole, will ever learn life’s true and refined joys until women are legally upheld in their own work of carrying out that law of liberty to all as opposed to license in any; which law enables the evolution of such a joyous love of decency, and such reverence for the God-power in the blood and brain of each, as shall secure health, wealth and vivacity to individuals and the nations throughout the earth.”
“It is all true, true,” said Bertha. “But that comes from beliefs which are all one. But yet you said five points of faith, and I shall learn them all. So you would better name the fifth, by telling me what is purity. You say it is natural and inherent to humanity. And you tell me it is profitable; and what the social result would be if we all possessed it and lived according to its law. But what is it, what does it consist in?”
“To be pure, the dictionary tells us, is to be unsullied, unmixed, genuine, unqualified. Purity is free from a burdensome sense of shame, and is full of an invigorating courage which is wide away from all necessity of making and loving those things which the Bible calls ‘lies.’ Because a robust healthfulness fills with courage those who habitually practice the scientific law of purity. So that, in the character of a Right Honorable, purity, courage and truth knit each other up into a triuned power against which nothing can prevail. Purity knows how to deal in an offhand way with its own nature and needs, being full of the courage of its own convictions as to what it wants to do and be.
“The courage of purity is full of simplicity and high achievement; quite the opposite of that bravado which, attached to inordinate desires, is full of duplicity and failure. Purity is not timid, for it is its own protector. It is genuine, unmixed God-power, and makes its possessor a partaker in omnipotent omniscience. This fact all can prove for themselves who enable themselves to do so.
“It consists in an intelligent use of the vital element of blood and brain; and this intelligent use is religion itself. For, Bertha, the vitality within us is the divine creative power of Jehovah, and should be reverenced with awe. I repeat it, I distinctly believe this elusive, thrilling gladness-element of mind and nerve, is the joy-power, the intellectual vigor of that Vital One, the being whom we call God; who is the breath of our lives, and of whom we are competent to know more and more eternally.
“Now the only real class distinction between people is—not that some are rich and some are poor, not that some are university graduates and some are not, but—that some have cultivated and know their possibilities of garnering up this vital force within their own nerve centers, ready for use, just as the electric dynamo captures and garners up the electric current, that it may be in readiness to achieve great results for this great age.
“Those who have this order of self-sovereignty have what the world cannot give and cannot take away. Those whose self-sovereignty is founded on this unimpregnable purity of brain and nerve have entered into a permanent delight in life. And no matter to what retreat their humble duty calls them, they are among the rulers of the age.