And it is the power of love that keeps many right. In many men it is
love for an ideal woman that does it. They keep themselves from evil
because, though they may never have met her, they believe one day they
will, and they want to bring her their best selves without any spot of
defilement. In many girls love works in the same redemptive way. And
perhaps in both what is really working is a mystic longing after the
best that life can hold, and a half-conscious understanding that that
best is only for those who preserve unity between body and spirit, and
keep the body in bonds until the pure command of love itself summons it
to freedom.

And yet it is infamous that the struggle should be so hard for so many.
All of us who are ignorant or complacent or skeptical about the social
evils of our time are sharers in the iniquity of those who fall. Many
of us live in mean satisfaction, just because we ourselves have found
comfort and security; that is how these evil forces are able to go on
year after year leading thousands to their undoing. If the test of a
real passion for purity lies in caring about the forces that make for
impurity and caring to the point of suffering for those who fall, then
I fear few of us have that passion in any really effective and holy
form. And it will need passion to compete with the forces that lie
behind evil social conditions. They are entrenched behind the power of
money, and I know of only one passion that is stronger than money.

When will all who really love take up the challenge of this disordered
modern world? We talk. We confer. We discuss social reform. But we do
not love. And that is why Mammon is able to laugh at us, and go on
dragging our boys and girls down into the mire.