and no way into purity and joy even for those who have wandered. Were
that so I could not write at all about this subject, for it would then
be too tragic.

Perhaps the worst consequence of aberrations in thought and conduct is
that they make it very very hard to be perfectly happy and unashamed
when at last love calls them to enter into the inner chambers of
marriage and romance. The shadows that rest at times on that part of
marriage even for some very happy lovers are due to the fact that the
man (or sometimes the woman) was once involved in something else before
that was a little like it, and yet was haunted then by a sense of
wrong-doing and so could not have a perfect experience. It is only to
the pure that _all_ things are pure.

But it is _not_ true that the past need dog and spoil the future. It is
not true that sin is irremediable, nor that its stains remain for ever.
The essential and central thing in Christianity is the assertion that
there is a remedy for the situation that sin creates.

I do not think there is any remedy to be found in simply trying to
ignore the past--or in saying that our aberrations were only those of
ninety per cent. of mankind, and were so natural as to be not worth
bothering about. In such ways we may push the past out of sight, but we
do not deal with it. It remains there though out of sight. For the fact
is that such sayings do not quite convince us, and therefore they
cannot kill the past.

Nor is there any remedy to be found merely in the forgiveness of man or
of woman. Women are proverbially, and perhaps divinely, willing to
forgive. But a woman's forgiveness does not necessarily make a man able