tempted like as we are. To suggest that in passion and in its exercise
at the bidding of love there need be anything that is not holy, is to
arraign the Creator. Sex love abused and misunderstood has indeed
strewn the world with tragedies and disease. But sex love is going to
remain. Not until we have learnt to make it an instrument for the
perfection of life and the heightening of vitality can we hope to reach
the life which the love of God designed for us; and to that we shall
not attain until we have dared to acquire knowledge and through
knowledge to attain to wisdom.

The ideal which still lingers in many minds, though it is seldom openly
confessed, is that boys and girls, young men and women, should be kept
in complete ignorance of the truth about their sexual natures until
they marry, and that then they should be left to learn all that they
need to know from Mother Nature direct. That at least would seem to be
a fair inference from the fact of the conspiracy of silence in which
ninety per cent of parents have engaged towards the beings they love
best.

Unfortunately in order to carry out the policy thus implied it would be
necessary to keep children from associating with other children, to
forbid them to read the Bible, the great classics of literature, and
the daily papers--to keep them from the theatre, and from the study of
nature--in fact to bring them up in a world which does not exist. For
in all the ways I have suggested do boys and girls now collect garbled,
half-true, and distorted notions about sexual life. And even if it were
possible to carry out the policy it would still not be desirable.
Marriage is not the simple and easy thing which the policy would imply.
Mother Nature does not teach young couples all that they need to know.
Often they make serious mistakes in the first few days. Often they