Such pessimism, however, contradicts the history as well as the instincts of the race. In the face of great evils there have always been those who would sit down in discouragement despair; every great destructive force in human history has daunted some men to the point of inactivity. Yet the evils have been controlled. Ignorant and fearful people have said, "This thing is beyond human power; it is useless for us to struggle against fate." Yet men of vision and of courage have struggled and won. No man of moral passion and religious purpose can adopt an attitude of passive submission to the forces of destruction. We can admit no necessary evil, or the battle of human progress is lost. We ask ourselves soberly, therefore, how this tremendous outrush of destructive energy may be controlled. The answer is plain. Men have by the agency of fire itself constructed the means by which fire is controlled and domesticated; they have turned disease against itself, and by the agency of antitoxins have conquered it; they are learning to arouse and organize the fighting spirit of men against its own most ancient and fearful expression and are enlisting soldiers of peace in a war against war. Even so the race depends upon the higher affections for control of the lower, and lust is controlled by love. I talked once to a young man in college who had given himself to sexual vice when he had been in high school; until a year before I spoke with him, he had supposed that virtually all men were and must be sexually indulgent. For twelve months he had kept himself clean. I inquired why and how. He replied simply that he had fallen in love with a young woman and wished to marry her. His former course now seemed to him shameful and unmanly. Lust yielding to love! In one of his sonnets to the woman who afterward became his wife, Edmund Spenser says:—
"You frame my thoughts and fashion me within:
You stop my tongue and teach my heart to speak:
You calm the storm that passion did begin:
Strong through your cause, but by your virtue weak."
In our own experience, as far as we have achieved victory in our own bodies and minds over our baser passions, we have achieved it by the power of the higher affections. It is a fact of common experience that love calms the storm that passion did begin. So Spenser's lady strengthened passion by her charm, but weakened it by her virtue.
Nor is this the only higher affection that, in the practical experience of men, has controlled and transformed animal passion. Thousands of fully sexed men have, through the centuries, turned their bodily and mental energies so fully to devoted service for God and their fellows as to rise above the clamoring demands of physical appetite, in the vigorous terms of the New Testament making themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of God's sake. This is a hard saying, and the experience it treats of must always be confined to a small number of men; yet it goes far toward demonstrating a general possibility, and it should effectively dispose of the "necessity" argument, by which men often excuse their vicious practices.
One thing more should be said on this subject of control. Not only are the higher, more spiritual affections the most effective masters of the lower; they are the only effective masters. Public reprobation can do much, but it is ineffectual with large numbers of relatively unattached members of society, and it is impotent against secret vice. Motives of cautious fear are always weak with full-blooded and generous youth, and they are likely to become weaker with all men as medical science discovers ways to prevent or escape the most obviously fearful consequences of sexual license.
A familiar phrase comes to my mind, as no doubt it comes to yours: "The expulsive power of the higher affections"; yet I think that phrase is not quite suitable. It is not a question of expulsion. It is not wholly a question of control; it is mainly a question of direction. What we need to-day with boys and girls for the solving of the sex problems is to direct those energies, which in their false direction are destructive, into right and healthful ways; that is, we need to socialize and elevate that affection, which in baser forms has aspects of ugly animalism.
As one of the solutions of the problem of control it has been proposed to separate the sexes in the adolescent years. From my point of view, this would defeat our object. In the association of boys and girls during the adolescent period, we may enlist the higher affections for the control and the direction of the powers that are set free by sex impulses developed in that very period of life.
What happens in the experience of the normal boy? In this period of early adolescence he finds within himself a wonderful quickening of mind,—impulses, feelings, longings that he does not understand. These impulses, feelings, longings, perplex him, it may be for years. They reach out vaguely, blindly toward the opposite sex, sometimes in a perverted way, but oftener naturally and honestly. Then the young man falls in love. At once his more or less vague, cloudy, incoherent, formless feelings and purposes are concentrated, directed, and fixed in devotion to a young woman whom he idealizes, almost deifies. That is the first stage in the natural directing and forming of sex powers and impulses toward social, moral, and religious ends. Of course the young man may discover, after a while, that the first object of his fancy is not so angelic as he thought. By and by his fancy changes and may rove to several other maidens before he reaches maturity; but each successive experience, if he is true to his better self, concentrates his affections and directs them, until, if he is fortunate, in the course of time he finds his true mate and enters upon marriage. He is now fairly equipped for what most of us know to be a long course in the discipline of the selfish, the personal, the more or less brute desires and ambitions of man. Here he learns to subject himself, his own comfort, his own ends, his own ambitions, to the good of his wife and her happiness, to the good of his children and the satisfaction of their needs. Then, more and more, after having concentrated the powers of his spirit through faithful courtship and through happy marriage and fatherhood, the man is able to diffuse these same energies through many channels, for the protection of all sorts and conditions of women and children. The man is now a citizen, a member of society, with developed powers of social sympathy, of social energy. How has he developed these powers? Not by any supposition that the early sex instincts he felt in his boyhood were wholly animal and must be atrophied by disuse, but by gathering and directing them into the right channels. Direction, like control, depends upon enlightened, purposeful, persistent love.
In the third place, we may consider how, in matters of sex, the flesh and the soul may grow together in mutual help. The essential facts and the vital importance of the sex life appeal to the developing boy or girl in four great relations, in relation to father and mother, in relation to the strength and grace of his or her own body and mind, in relation to his or her future family, and in relation to society in general. These appeals come in successive periods and open the way to healthful instruction and guidance from childhood up to manhood and womanhood.
Sex questions first arise in the child's mind in connection with parenthood. The first thing a little boy or girl needs to know is that the young life is sheltered and fed during long months in the mother's body, and that the father had a share in that life. Is it not amazing that in this twentieth century we find many girls twelve years old and over who do not know that their father had any share in starting their lives? I knew of a girl nineteen years old, a student in college, who did not know that a man had any essential part in bringing children into the world, but supposed, when any question of illegitimate childbirth was raised, that possibly God punished a bad woman by sending her a baby before she was married. It is little short of criminal that many girls are allowed to reach adolescence with no sex thought or image clearly in their minds except such as they have received directly or indirectly from animals. If boys and girls knew from the beginning that a part of the father's life and a part of the mother's life united to form the beginning of their lives, the question of sex would begin on a plane where there were religious, moral, and spiritual associations, and an atmosphere of love and holiness. These young people could then see the facts of sex clearly instead of through the mists of prurient fancy and suggestion as they see them now.[60] The boy and girl who know these two tremendous facts of the nurturing care of the mother before birth, and the coöperation of the father and mother in the beginning of life, are fortified against the principal moral and spiritual dangers that they are to face in the future.