by nature, without any need for the trouble of acquiring it. Of woman as a
real human being, with sexual needs and sexual responsibilities, morality
has often known nothing. It has been content to preach restraint to man,
an abstract and meaningless restraint even if it were possible. But when
we have regard to the actual facts of life, we can no longer place virtue
in a vacuum. Women are just as apt as men to be afflicted by the petty
jealousies and narrownesses of the crude sexual impulse; women just as
much as men need the perpetual sublimation of erotic desire into forms of
more sincere purity, of larger harmony, in gaining which ends all the
essential ends of morality are alone gained. The delicate adjustment of
the needs of each sex to the needs of the other sex to the end of what
Chaucer called fine loving, the adjustment of the needs of both sexes to
the larger ends of fine living, may well furnish a perpetual moral
discipline which extends its fortifying influence to men and women alike.

It is this universality of sexual emotion, blending in its own mighty
stream, as is now realised, many other currents of emotion, even the
parental and the filial, and traceable even in childhood,--the wide
efflorescence of an energy constantly generated by a vital internal
mechanism,--which renders vain all attempts either to suppress or to
ignore the problem of sex, however immensely urgent we might foolishly
imagine such attempts to be. Even the history of the early Christian
ascetics in Egypt, as recorded in the contemporary _Paradise_ of
Palladius, illustrates the futility of seeking to quench the unquenchable,
the flame of fire which is life itself. These "athletes of the Lord" were
under the best possible conditions for the conquest of lust; they had been
driven into the solitude of the desert by a genuine deeply-felt impulse,
they could regulate their lives as they would, and they possessed an
almost inconceivable energy of resolution. They were prepared to live on
herbs, even to eat grass, and to undertake any labour of self-denial. They