women for reasons which seem to them good should none the less miss the
joy and exaltation which might be theirs, and should compel their
husbands to suffer also.

It is strange but it is true that the two commonest reasons for the
failure of marriage in this aspect of it are a lustful view of it and a
mistakenly spiritual view of it. A lustful view of it will lead people
to be content with merely physical unity, though they are attaining to
no union of their mental and spiritual lives. And that means that
marriage is a very poor affair. But on the other hand this falsely
spiritual view will lead to an attempt to leave the body out. And that
is a course of folly for incarnate spirits. The real end of marriage is
a unity in which body, soul, and spirit will all play a part, and
nothing else really satisfies. It has been wisely said that "there are
liberating and harmonizing influences which are imparted by sexual
union and which give wholesome balance and sanity to the whole organism
provided that union is the outcome of psychic as well as physical
needs. . . . Through harmonious sex relationships a deeper spiritual
unity is reached than can possibly be derived from continence either in
or out of marriage."

The waiting-rooms of specialists in nervous disease are crowded by men
and women suffering from nerve trouble through failure to attain
harmonious sexual relations in married life. But many of them might
have escaped that fate had they only been able to take the simple
Christian view of themselves and their natural functions. It was a God
of love who made us as we are, and we only interfere with His plans for
us when we try on this earth to live as if we were out of it, or call
that unclean which in His wisdom He has set in the center of our life.