"But this is a certain truth, that any human being, any one of us, no matter how fallen and degraded, is an infinitely more glorious and adorable being than any God that ever was or will be conceived" (p. 413).
In justice to the memory of John Stuart Mill, whom Malthusians are ever quoting, it should be noted that the foregoing blasphemy is nothing more nor less than a burlesque of Positivism or of Agnosticism. The teaching of Mill, Bain, and of Herbert Spencer was that the knowledge of God and of His nature is impossible, because our senses are the only source of knowledge. Their reasoning was wrong—because a primary condition of all knowledge is memory, in itself an intuition, because primary mathematical axioms are intellectual intuitions, and because mind has the power of abstraction; but, even so, not one of these men was capable of having written the above-quoted passage. The next quotation refers to marriage.
"Marriage is based upon the idea that constant and unvarying love is the only one which is pure and honourable, and which should be recognised as morally good. But there could not be a greater error than this. Love is, like all other human passions and appetites, subject to change, deriving a great part of its force and continuance from variety in its objects; and to attempt to fix it to an invariable channel is to try to alter the laws of its nature"(p. 353).
That quotation is an example of how evil ideas may arise from muddled thinking: because if the word "lust" be substituted for the word "love" in the third sentence, the remaining forty-five words would merely convey a simple truth, expressed by Kipling in two lines:
"For the more you 'ave known o' the others
The less will you settle to one."
Very few people, I suppose, are so foolish as to believe that man is by nature either a chaste or a constant animal, and indeed in this respect he appears to his disadvantage when compared with certain varieties of birds, which are by nature constant to each other. On the other hand, millions of people believe that man is able to overcome his animal nature; and for the past two thousand years the civilised races of the world have held that this is a goal towards which mankind should strive. In the opinion of Christendom chastity and marriage are both morally good, but, according to the philosophy of our Neo-Malthusian author, they are morally evil.
"Chastity, or complete sexual abstinence, so far from being a virtue, is invariably a great natural sin" (p. 162).
Is it not obvious that to the writers of such passages love is synonymous with animalism, with lust? It is by no means necessary to go to saints or to moralists for a refutation of this Neo-Malthusian philosophy. Does any decent ordinary man or woman agree with it? Ask the man in the street. Turn the pages of our literature. Refer to Chaucer or Spenser, to Shakespeare or Milton, refer to Fielding or Burns or Scott or Tennyson. Some of these men were very imperfect; but they all knew the difference between lust and love; and it is because they can tell us at least something of that which is precious, enduring, ethereal, and divine in love that we read their pages and honour their names. Not one of these men could have written the following sentence:
"Marriage distracts our attention from the real sexual duties, and this is one of its worst effects" (p. 366).
Now it is certain that if "the real sexual duties" are represented by promiscuous fornication, then both marriage and chastity are evil things. That philosophy is very old. From time immemorial—it has been advocated by one of the most powerful intelligences in the universe. Such is the soil on which the Neo-Malthusian fungus has grown—a soil that would rot the foundations of Europe.