with any enthusiastic approval of marriage, for if continence is beautiful
how can marriage make it cease to be so?

Both these streams of feeling, it may be noted, sprang from a common
source far back in the primitive human world. All the emanations of the
human body, all the spontaneous manifestations of its activities, were
mysterious and ominous to early man, pregnant with terror unless met with
immense precautions and surrounded by careful ritual. The manifestations
of sex were the least intelligible and the most spontaneous. Therefore the
things of sex were those that most lent themselves to feelings of horror
and awe, of impurity and of purity. They seemed so highly charged with
magic potency that there were no things that men more sought to avoid, yet
none to which they were impelled to give more thought. The manifold echoes
of that primitive conception of sex, and all the violent reactions that
were thus evolved and eventually bound up with the original impulse,
compose the streams of tradition that feed our modern world in this matter
and determine the ideas of purity that surround us.

At the present day the crude theory of the sexual impulse held on one
side, and the ignorant rejection of theory altogether on the other side,
are beginning to be seen as both alike unjustified. We begin to find the
grounds for a sounder theory. Not indeed that the problems of sex, which
go so deeply into the whole personal and social life, can ever be settled
exclusively upon physiological grounds. But we have done much to prepare
even the loftiest Building of Love when we have attained a clear view of
its biological basis.

The progress of chemico-physiological research during recent years has now
brought us to new ground for our building. Indeed the image might well be
changed altogether, and it might be said that science has entirely