mishandle and spoil the beautiful relationship on which they have
entered to their own disgust and disappointment. Uncounted couples
to-day have reason for the bitterness with which they complain that
nobody ever taught or helped them. In fact the policy of silence is as
cruel as its assumptions are untrue. Ignorance is an impossibility for
the young. Our choice lies between garbled, distorted, and defiled
knowledge and a knowledge that shall be clean, innocent, and helpful.
It has often happened that men and women brought up on the policy of
silence have first learnt the facts about life through some contact
with vice or sin, and those who know what horrible sufferings sudden
discoveries of that sort may mean for sensitive natures cannot possibly
have any doubts remaining on this point. There are few more cruel
things possible than to bring a girl up in the ignorance which is
mistaken for innocence and then to allow her to go out into the world
to learn the truth by chance, or through some unclean mind.

That is why I gladly address myself to the task of this book, in which
at least some of the truth is told.

Of course the real issue that stands in the background here is the one
which concerns the nature of true spirituality. We are all agreed that
the essential greatness of man lies in the fact that in him spirit may
rule everything else. And until spirit does thus rule he has not
reached his true life, But the question of the place of the body in the
full life of man still remains to be faced and thought out.

The hermits of the desert assumed that the way of true life lay in the
repression of all bodily desire and as much negation of the body as is
consistent with mere existence. But in fact they often succeeded in
making life disgusting, and generally in making it useless. It may be